My mom and I decorated the house today to welcome back Cindy. She’s been gone from my life for about two years now, and because my mom never measures anything in absolute terms, she’s been gone from my mom’s life for about ten years. (That’s my mom’s estimate, not mine.) We decorated the house with things that we thought Cindy would like. We popped popcorn and strung some along the tree. Dennis ate half the popcorn we popped so we were only able to drape the kernels over the bottom of the tree, which is anyway, the part that counts and looks the best.
Dennis is getting an older kid’s head, but he still laughs like a baby, and when I touch his hair, it’s soft like a baby’s hair, so I can’t bring myself to treat him like an older kid. He still wants to sleep in my room, so we sleep on the floor and pick lint out of my carpet before bed. We’re getting attached in a way that seems familiar. He wants me to take him everywhere and he gets angry when I laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing at you. It’s a compliment. I think you’re funny.”
“I’m telling.”
“You can’t tell on me for paying you a favor. This is a good thing. I think you’re funny.”
But everything hurts him, even the good stuff, and I know why. Next year, I will be leaving too, and Ms. F, who comes out in the morning with her snake wrapped around her neck, said to me, “Your family is dissolving, don’t you see? One by one you’re all leaving, and when children leave they never come back.” But Ms. F only says that because her own children died in the jungle and no one knows how it happened, but I’m not going to dissolve the family just by leaving, and no one knows that I’m always thinking about death and dying, not that I’m suicidal, just that I can’t stop thinking about it, and up until Ms. F came up to me, I had only thought about it for myself, how horrible it would be the day I lost all consciousness, feeling, and anything at all, but now I’m also thinking about my mom and dad, Dennis and Cindy, and all of a sudden I also think maybe one day they will die in an accident on the freeway while driving up to see me in my college, wherever it might be, only Cindy, I guess, would probably not be in the car, because Cindy is always trying to be someplace that they are not.
____________
I showed mom and dad how to make cookies today with a recipe I learned from my friend Oscar and it made our house smell like a family staying in for the holidays.
____________
I have brief fantasies, while waiting for mom and dad to come back with Cindy, of stealing Ms. F’s snake and showing it to the video store clerk who doesn’t work at the video store, who maybe has read my letters and is trying to steer clear of me, if he even knows who I am, and impress him with my snake. Or, I would time warp and shrink myself into a little cane that fits in my mom’s ear and watch the boys come up to her and rack their brains for a reason to touch her. I think the less clever ones would hit her and say, “Ugly. Giant. Twiddly legs.” And the really suave ones would just say, “Excuse me,” and brush past her. Or, we live in our old house, and Cindy is putting my hair in braids, and Dennis is a little tiny baby who wears a blue knit cap and has fingers so small that I spend an entire afternoon trying to wrap a piece of ribbon around his thumb and pinky so I can say, “Look mom, look dad, this is your gift to me, so can you return that bike? I don’t need it anymore.”
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
12-20-06
After Cindy came home from Paris, she complained all day long about how mom and dad never drink any red wine.
“What’s the point of having lived in the United States for twenty plus years if you are just going to drink the same liquor you drank in China? And every time I come home, we’re still eating the same food, driving all the way out to Flushing to every friggin’ week to buy the same groceries.” Cindy turned to my mom and pointed right in her face, “You know, you’d like cheese more if you’d just try it.”
“I don’t like cheese. Why should I try it.” Sometimes, I think if my parents were the kind of parents who had gotten into the habit earlier on of slapping their children, then Cindy would get constantly slapped by my mom. They are kind of the same person, except Cindy has a sallow complexion and never smiles in pictures. They’re always accusing each other of things that the other person can’t help. When Cindy was away in France for the summer, I was in the eight grade, and Dennis was in second, and I was taking him to the park every day and pushing him in the one swing that the kids from the neighborhood didn’t graffiti or mess up in some way by throwing the swing all the way around itself. My favorite thing to do was to twist the swing around and around ten or thirteen times and then pick up Dennis and put him the swing and let it go. Sometimes he cried, and one time he yelled out, “Help!” and that had made me laugh so far that I dropped to the ground and muddied up the bottoms of my jeans. My second favorite thing to do was more straightforward. I just liked pushing Dennis in the swings even after he said, “Now, stop.” I would say, “Now, go? Okay, fine.”
“No, stop.”
“What, more? You’re awfully high, but if you say so.”
“No, stop, stop, stop.”
“I think I heard you say, more, more more.”
It was a boring summer otherwise, and I didn’t talk to Cindy on the phone hardly at all. My mom and her talked everyday and I would come with Dennis from an afternoon in the park and find my mom crouched up in the corner of our living room that gets no direct sunlight and talking animatedly to Cindy. I acted like I could really care less.
Cindy said she fell in love with a boy in Paris, and I said, “So, what else is new?” But Cindy showed me pictures of him that a woman had snapped for a magazine and he was sort of beautiful after all. He had this really long curly eyelashes and very messy blonde hair.
“He’s Scottish, and he took me on holiday to the south of France. We swam in the sea, and kissed on the streets. The people on the train were grinning at us because we were kissing so much.”
“Must have been a painful grin,” I mumbled, but Cindy was ecstatic from her love affair in France. She had gotten my parents to buy red wine for the house, a wedge of brie, and in the mornings, she would go down to our local bakery, which none of us had ever done before, and buy a fresh cut of bread.
“Do you know why the French live so long?”
We all shook our head and continued to watch Friends on TV. Dennis was crashing cars into my dad’s left foot.
“Because they actually enjoy life. They enjoy food, they enjoy living. It’s not like how it is here, everyone is always so concerned about their next promotion, working an extra hour because they think that’s the thing that’ll bring them closer to their raise in March. It’s just incredible the way Americans are obsessed with these trifling matters and miss out on the entire grand statement that is life. In France, everyone takes a six week holiday, and everyone enjoys their weekend, instead of hovering over their computer, madly trying to work from home and—”
“Where do you think you got the money to go to Paris from? Huh? Where did it come from? Did you produce it out of thin air?” my dad asked.
“Dad, this isn’t an attack on you. I know you work hard and it’s for us—”
“—So you can stop talking then. I don’t want you to talk about this in my house. I don’t want anyone to talk about anything, in fact, for the rest of the day.” Dennis rammed another car into dad’s foot, and dad picked up the car and threw it in the trash. I held Dennis in my arms for a bit to keep him from crying. I could kind of understand what Cindy was getting at. It was one of those things where suddenly I woke up in the morning and I realized that I had barely seen my dad more than an hour or two each day for the past year, and I loved my bed, I loved my posters, I loved the small pens my mom and dad bought me last year just like I asked, I loved my new jacket with the fake fur lining, and the earrings that dangled and made a clinking sound when I walked down the street, and I loved our skylight windows that made the mornings seem magically draped with sunlight, and I loved this house so so much, but like everyone else, I felt convinced that I could give at least some or maybe even all of this up, just to see my dad a little bit more.
____________
We have another neighbor who gives us candy for no particular reason, and she wears nice sunglasses even on cloudy days, and she wears shorts even on cold days, and we call her Aunt May, even though she’s not our aunt, and we never see her in the month of May. She says she has to hibernate in the spring because it’s the birth of life she’s afraid of, not the end, and ever since she’s said that, I’ve wanted to ask her, “So, does this mean you’re not afraid to die?” but it not really a question I’ve ever dared to ask anyone.
Aunt May is older than my mom but younger than my grandmothers, and she has no children or husband, so she spends all her time doing things for children in the neighborhood, like baking cookies and making fresh lemonade and she’ll just stand outside holding plate of cookies in one hand, and a pitcher of lemonade in another, never getting tired of holding these things up, and waiting for someone to come home from school or leave their house to play ball on the street, and get thirsty or hungry. When I talk to Aunt May, she smiles a lot and has little tiny folds of skin that bunch up around the edges of her eyes and once she had a bit of dirt in those folds and I told her to close her eyes so I could rub them and she pulled away and said, “That won’t be necessary,” and went back inside her house for a moment.
Aunt May thinks I’m more beautiful than Cindy but that I’m going through an awkward period of my life, and I tell her that I’m sixteen, and what about all those songs men sing about being sixteen and beautiful, and how it’s the most lovely year of a young girl’s life, and she tells me that the kind of beauty that has everlasting powers, that remains till the very end is the kind of girl who blossoms slowly, and I ask her, if she means painfully slowly, and she tells me, yes, painfully slowly.
____________
“What’s the point of having lived in the United States for twenty plus years if you are just going to drink the same liquor you drank in China? And every time I come home, we’re still eating the same food, driving all the way out to Flushing to every friggin’ week to buy the same groceries.” Cindy turned to my mom and pointed right in her face, “You know, you’d like cheese more if you’d just try it.”
“I don’t like cheese. Why should I try it.” Sometimes, I think if my parents were the kind of parents who had gotten into the habit earlier on of slapping their children, then Cindy would get constantly slapped by my mom. They are kind of the same person, except Cindy has a sallow complexion and never smiles in pictures. They’re always accusing each other of things that the other person can’t help. When Cindy was away in France for the summer, I was in the eight grade, and Dennis was in second, and I was taking him to the park every day and pushing him in the one swing that the kids from the neighborhood didn’t graffiti or mess up in some way by throwing the swing all the way around itself. My favorite thing to do was to twist the swing around and around ten or thirteen times and then pick up Dennis and put him the swing and let it go. Sometimes he cried, and one time he yelled out, “Help!” and that had made me laugh so far that I dropped to the ground and muddied up the bottoms of my jeans. My second favorite thing to do was more straightforward. I just liked pushing Dennis in the swings even after he said, “Now, stop.” I would say, “Now, go? Okay, fine.”
“No, stop.”
“What, more? You’re awfully high, but if you say so.”
“No, stop, stop, stop.”
“I think I heard you say, more, more more.”
It was a boring summer otherwise, and I didn’t talk to Cindy on the phone hardly at all. My mom and her talked everyday and I would come with Dennis from an afternoon in the park and find my mom crouched up in the corner of our living room that gets no direct sunlight and talking animatedly to Cindy. I acted like I could really care less.
Cindy said she fell in love with a boy in Paris, and I said, “So, what else is new?” But Cindy showed me pictures of him that a woman had snapped for a magazine and he was sort of beautiful after all. He had this really long curly eyelashes and very messy blonde hair.
“He’s Scottish, and he took me on holiday to the south of France. We swam in the sea, and kissed on the streets. The people on the train were grinning at us because we were kissing so much.”
“Must have been a painful grin,” I mumbled, but Cindy was ecstatic from her love affair in France. She had gotten my parents to buy red wine for the house, a wedge of brie, and in the mornings, she would go down to our local bakery, which none of us had ever done before, and buy a fresh cut of bread.
“Do you know why the French live so long?”
We all shook our head and continued to watch Friends on TV. Dennis was crashing cars into my dad’s left foot.
“Because they actually enjoy life. They enjoy food, they enjoy living. It’s not like how it is here, everyone is always so concerned about their next promotion, working an extra hour because they think that’s the thing that’ll bring them closer to their raise in March. It’s just incredible the way Americans are obsessed with these trifling matters and miss out on the entire grand statement that is life. In France, everyone takes a six week holiday, and everyone enjoys their weekend, instead of hovering over their computer, madly trying to work from home and—”
“Where do you think you got the money to go to Paris from? Huh? Where did it come from? Did you produce it out of thin air?” my dad asked.
“Dad, this isn’t an attack on you. I know you work hard and it’s for us—”
“—So you can stop talking then. I don’t want you to talk about this in my house. I don’t want anyone to talk about anything, in fact, for the rest of the day.” Dennis rammed another car into dad’s foot, and dad picked up the car and threw it in the trash. I held Dennis in my arms for a bit to keep him from crying. I could kind of understand what Cindy was getting at. It was one of those things where suddenly I woke up in the morning and I realized that I had barely seen my dad more than an hour or two each day for the past year, and I loved my bed, I loved my posters, I loved the small pens my mom and dad bought me last year just like I asked, I loved my new jacket with the fake fur lining, and the earrings that dangled and made a clinking sound when I walked down the street, and I loved our skylight windows that made the mornings seem magically draped with sunlight, and I loved this house so so much, but like everyone else, I felt convinced that I could give at least some or maybe even all of this up, just to see my dad a little bit more.
____________
We have another neighbor who gives us candy for no particular reason, and she wears nice sunglasses even on cloudy days, and she wears shorts even on cold days, and we call her Aunt May, even though she’s not our aunt, and we never see her in the month of May. She says she has to hibernate in the spring because it’s the birth of life she’s afraid of, not the end, and ever since she’s said that, I’ve wanted to ask her, “So, does this mean you’re not afraid to die?” but it not really a question I’ve ever dared to ask anyone.
Aunt May is older than my mom but younger than my grandmothers, and she has no children or husband, so she spends all her time doing things for children in the neighborhood, like baking cookies and making fresh lemonade and she’ll just stand outside holding plate of cookies in one hand, and a pitcher of lemonade in another, never getting tired of holding these things up, and waiting for someone to come home from school or leave their house to play ball on the street, and get thirsty or hungry. When I talk to Aunt May, she smiles a lot and has little tiny folds of skin that bunch up around the edges of her eyes and once she had a bit of dirt in those folds and I told her to close her eyes so I could rub them and she pulled away and said, “That won’t be necessary,” and went back inside her house for a moment.
Aunt May thinks I’m more beautiful than Cindy but that I’m going through an awkward period of my life, and I tell her that I’m sixteen, and what about all those songs men sing about being sixteen and beautiful, and how it’s the most lovely year of a young girl’s life, and she tells me that the kind of beauty that has everlasting powers, that remains till the very end is the kind of girl who blossoms slowly, and I ask her, if she means painfully slowly, and she tells me, yes, painfully slowly.
____________
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
12-19-06
When Cindy first left home for college, my mom cried everyday. Dennis was only three years old. I was okay, just felt a tiny bit betrayed, a tiny bit emptied out of all the good parts. But my mother cried every day, and she did it sitting right in front of us, at the kitchen table, while the rest of us ate. Sometimes, I would take her bowl and put it on the far end of the kitchen table because I didn’t want her to cry and eat.
Sometimes, Cindy would come home and have a blank look in her eyes for days. Sometimes, she woke us up with her crying in the middle of the night. She had lost someone who she loved to another girl, or they just simply lost interest in her, and she said to me once when I came into her room after being woken up by a long hiccupped breath that came from her end of the hall, “You think it’s so dramatic when you hear about someone killing themselves just because they were dumped, but then you feel the complete pointlessness of being alive after someone you loved for a year just stops feeling that same love back to you, and then you understand a little bit.”
I wanted to tell her that my mom probably sometimes felt like there was no point to this house without Cindy’s presence. I wanted Cindy to know that it was the way that Cindy didn’t even think about mom, never cried about our mom, that made our mom feel like her life was already over. Sometimes, I want to take Dennis with me and crawl into bed with my mom and give her little hugs all night long. Sometimes, I pretend I’m mom and I make Dennis pretend to be me, and I imitate my mom when she’s wrapped up thinking about Cindy, as if Cindy might never come home again, as if she was gone from our lives forever, and not just temporarily, and I would rock back and forth and push my hair forward in front of my eyes while I pretended to cry, and then Dennis would come up to me and try to give me a hug, but he was so small that it just felt really nice, his small hands grabbing my shoulder and I would say, “Go away unless you’re Cindy,” which wasn’t something my mom ever said, but I worried sometimes that she was speaking to us in codes, and so I was always trying to crack them, and this was just what I came up with.
I like our neighbors. Some of them own cats and dogs, and one of them owns a snake. The one who owns a snake wants us to call her Ms. F and Dennis is the only one of us who actually does that. Cindy and I just call her “hey you” even though she’s older and it’s not really showing respect. Still, that’s just what we like to do. Ms. F wears a small gold jewel in the middle of her forehead and she used to live in the jungles of Cambodia where she had to beat down snakes with her bare feet to survive, but she always secretly loved them, so she ended up taking buying a snake as soon as she arrived in the United States, and she also married an Indian husband who we never saw for more than a few minutes each month, but we always marveled at his moustache. How did he get it to be so perfectly curled at the ends?
Sometimes, Cindy would come home and have a blank look in her eyes for days. Sometimes, she woke us up with her crying in the middle of the night. She had lost someone who she loved to another girl, or they just simply lost interest in her, and she said to me once when I came into her room after being woken up by a long hiccupped breath that came from her end of the hall, “You think it’s so dramatic when you hear about someone killing themselves just because they were dumped, but then you feel the complete pointlessness of being alive after someone you loved for a year just stops feeling that same love back to you, and then you understand a little bit.”
I wanted to tell her that my mom probably sometimes felt like there was no point to this house without Cindy’s presence. I wanted Cindy to know that it was the way that Cindy didn’t even think about mom, never cried about our mom, that made our mom feel like her life was already over. Sometimes, I want to take Dennis with me and crawl into bed with my mom and give her little hugs all night long. Sometimes, I pretend I’m mom and I make Dennis pretend to be me, and I imitate my mom when she’s wrapped up thinking about Cindy, as if Cindy might never come home again, as if she was gone from our lives forever, and not just temporarily, and I would rock back and forth and push my hair forward in front of my eyes while I pretended to cry, and then Dennis would come up to me and try to give me a hug, but he was so small that it just felt really nice, his small hands grabbing my shoulder and I would say, “Go away unless you’re Cindy,” which wasn’t something my mom ever said, but I worried sometimes that she was speaking to us in codes, and so I was always trying to crack them, and this was just what I came up with.
I like our neighbors. Some of them own cats and dogs, and one of them owns a snake. The one who owns a snake wants us to call her Ms. F and Dennis is the only one of us who actually does that. Cindy and I just call her “hey you” even though she’s older and it’s not really showing respect. Still, that’s just what we like to do. Ms. F wears a small gold jewel in the middle of her forehead and she used to live in the jungles of Cambodia where she had to beat down snakes with her bare feet to survive, but she always secretly loved them, so she ended up taking buying a snake as soon as she arrived in the United States, and she also married an Indian husband who we never saw for more than a few minutes each month, but we always marveled at his moustache. How did he get it to be so perfectly curled at the ends?
Monday, December 18, 2006
12-18-06
On the day my brother was born, I was exactly nine years old, and my friend Hanzhi, who later changed his name to Harry, was eight years and some months, and it was a beautiful time because no one had started to make fun of us yet for being best friends (we had about a year and half of this bliss left), even though we were basically asking for the ridicule with our role-playing games. They all went along the lines of: I was his wife, he was handsome, I had a sharp wit, he had good arms, I knew an impressive amount of words, he could bench 250, we served in the secret service and had committed to spending our entire lives trying to vanquish enemies from the outside, and traitors from within (his dad and my dad of course, and their code names were Diarrhea Daddy, and Constipation Papa), and after we completed a mission (usually took about an afternoon’s time) we would pretend to sleep like husband and wife, and since we were so hyper all the time and would exert massive amounts of energy in trying to capture Diarrhea Daddy and Constipation Papa, whenever we ‘pretended’ to sleep, we would actually fall asleep, and all the grown-ups fawned at us, stood over us and whispered annoying things like, “They’re little monsters when they’re awake, but look how beautiful they look now,” as if we were better unconscious, as if the most beautiful state we could ever achieve was akin to being in a coma!
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was a junior in high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of the grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why she would want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a shithole.”
On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas, also known as Cindy and mine joint birthday. I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please, please, please not forget to get me a real present, two real presents, one real present for Christmas, and one real present for my birhday, if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on my/Cindy’s/Jesus, son of God’s birthday. But, despite all that, I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not digest properly because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekend, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of giant cylindrical presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born.” Hanzhi crumpled one of his pictures and threw it at my face. “He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano. My mom made me do one full hour, and it didn’t matter if I did in the morning or afternoon. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I was cute all morning, my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
I was mad at my mom and I decided I would not practice piano that day. She had broken her promise to me, and later she would probably say something like, “No, I never promised you that. No, I didn’t,” and she would make me cry and I would not have anything to say back because she was my mom, and she always had to have the final say. I said good-morning to Hanzhi’s mom and she hugged me tightly, her dirty apron getting on my cheek.
“You must be so happy, Cici,” she said in Chinese. “Your family is the first family to have three children.” She shook her head and looked away for a minute, “Well. Some couples don’t even have one child yet. You have to wonder why some people aren’t trying to have children when they are getting on in their age. They’ll be crying alone, with no children, no grandchildren come retirement age.” She hugged me again and I tried my best to crane my neck away from the spilt soy sauce on her apron.
I ran up the stairs to find Cindy. I wanted to pounce on her, with the stink of a night’s sleep still on my breath and yell into her face, “We have a baby brother!” but when I threw open her doors there was no one there. I had been left along in the house. They woke up Cindy and took her with them to the hospital, but they left me and called up Hanzhi’s mom. I was hopping mad.
I read a children’s book once about why bees sting human, and the story was extremely biased on the side on the bees. The tone of disdain for humans was something I only picked up on many years later when I was cleaning out my old bookcase filled with storybooks that my father would bring home from work back when he was the Language Coordinator at PS 156.
On one of the last pages of the book, there was an illustration of a bee that had been provoked by a thoughtless human and the bee had slits for eyes and was diving, stinger pointed southward, into a beefy, red-faced kid’s arm. The message was clear: the kid had it coming. For all intensive purposes, when my brother was born, I felt like a pissed off bee, and I zipped through the rooms of our house hitting all the things I could hit without getting in trouble: my parent’s mattress, my sister’s mattress, the clothes hanging in both of their closets, all of my own stuff, including a Clue board that I ripped in half and was never able to tape back together properly.
When my parents finally brought him home to me, I stared at him and dreamed of all the things I would do to make him miserable: twist his arm behind his back when my parents were away, shake his head because Cindy told me that her Biology teacher told her that children have soft brains until the age of two, and you should never ever ever ever shake a child before the age of two because you could incur brain damage, so yip yip hooray, that was going to be my new mission.
____________
I don’t end up strangling my brother. Every time I got near him he would start drooling and it was so pathetic that I couldn’t get my arms around his neck. I touched his nose and it was very wet and very cold. I blew hot breaths onto his nose and I remembered when Cindy told me that all boys are the same, they talk to you in the same way, and I didn’t even want to know this because I hated boys, I would always hate boys, and I hated when a boy hit me on the shoulder just so he could touch me, but Cindy was always telling me things about the boys she saw in the middle of the night when both our parents were asleep and she could have me guard the front door until she came back, so I would sit at the foot of the steps eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, catching crumbs with my nighgown, and waiting for her to come back angry, pissed off at another boy who was just like that other boy who was just like that other other boy.
“If you kiss them on the nose, they say, thank you,” she told me. “Then if you let them get at your boobs, they stop thanking you.”
“Why don’t you just hang out with girls then if you’re so sick of boys.”
“God, Cecilia. You’re such a baby.”
“I’m not. Dennis is a baby. Get it right, for once.”
“Thanks for watching the front door. Let’s go.”
The things I’d get for watching the front door for Cindy included a big fifty cent lollipop she got from the school President who was selling them so the French club could fund their annual Spring Break trip to Paris, a big stinky kiss on my cheek right as we were waking up in the morning and my mom was putting on her makeup and my dad was making us eggs, an invitation to borrow one of her clothes and wear it to school on a day that wearing good clothes didn’t matter that much to her, like when she had gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays and she didn’t want to get her good clothes all sweaty.
It was a nice time for me. I loved Cindy, and I loved Dennis, and I think they both, might have loved me too.
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was a junior in high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of the grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why she would want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a shithole.”
On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas, also known as Cindy and mine joint birthday. I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please, please, please not forget to get me a real present, two real presents, one real present for Christmas, and one real present for my birhday, if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on my/Cindy’s/Jesus, son of God’s birthday. But, despite all that, I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not digest properly because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekend, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of giant cylindrical presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born.” Hanzhi crumpled one of his pictures and threw it at my face. “He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano. My mom made me do one full hour, and it didn’t matter if I did in the morning or afternoon. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I was cute all morning, my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
I was mad at my mom and I decided I would not practice piano that day. She had broken her promise to me, and later she would probably say something like, “No, I never promised you that. No, I didn’t,” and she would make me cry and I would not have anything to say back because she was my mom, and she always had to have the final say. I said good-morning to Hanzhi’s mom and she hugged me tightly, her dirty apron getting on my cheek.
“You must be so happy, Cici,” she said in Chinese. “Your family is the first family to have three children.” She shook her head and looked away for a minute, “Well. Some couples don’t even have one child yet. You have to wonder why some people aren’t trying to have children when they are getting on in their age. They’ll be crying alone, with no children, no grandchildren come retirement age.” She hugged me again and I tried my best to crane my neck away from the spilt soy sauce on her apron.
I ran up the stairs to find Cindy. I wanted to pounce on her, with the stink of a night’s sleep still on my breath and yell into her face, “We have a baby brother!” but when I threw open her doors there was no one there. I had been left along in the house. They woke up Cindy and took her with them to the hospital, but they left me and called up Hanzhi’s mom. I was hopping mad.
I read a children’s book once about why bees sting human, and the story was extremely biased on the side on the bees. The tone of disdain for humans was something I only picked up on many years later when I was cleaning out my old bookcase filled with storybooks that my father would bring home from work back when he was the Language Coordinator at PS 156.
On one of the last pages of the book, there was an illustration of a bee that had been provoked by a thoughtless human and the bee had slits for eyes and was diving, stinger pointed southward, into a beefy, red-faced kid’s arm. The message was clear: the kid had it coming. For all intensive purposes, when my brother was born, I felt like a pissed off bee, and I zipped through the rooms of our house hitting all the things I could hit without getting in trouble: my parent’s mattress, my sister’s mattress, the clothes hanging in both of their closets, all of my own stuff, including a Clue board that I ripped in half and was never able to tape back together properly.
When my parents finally brought him home to me, I stared at him and dreamed of all the things I would do to make him miserable: twist his arm behind his back when my parents were away, shake his head because Cindy told me that her Biology teacher told her that children have soft brains until the age of two, and you should never ever ever ever shake a child before the age of two because you could incur brain damage, so yip yip hooray, that was going to be my new mission.
____________
I don’t end up strangling my brother. Every time I got near him he would start drooling and it was so pathetic that I couldn’t get my arms around his neck. I touched his nose and it was very wet and very cold. I blew hot breaths onto his nose and I remembered when Cindy told me that all boys are the same, they talk to you in the same way, and I didn’t even want to know this because I hated boys, I would always hate boys, and I hated when a boy hit me on the shoulder just so he could touch me, but Cindy was always telling me things about the boys she saw in the middle of the night when both our parents were asleep and she could have me guard the front door until she came back, so I would sit at the foot of the steps eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, catching crumbs with my nighgown, and waiting for her to come back angry, pissed off at another boy who was just like that other boy who was just like that other other boy.
“If you kiss them on the nose, they say, thank you,” she told me. “Then if you let them get at your boobs, they stop thanking you.”
“Why don’t you just hang out with girls then if you’re so sick of boys.”
“God, Cecilia. You’re such a baby.”
“I’m not. Dennis is a baby. Get it right, for once.”
“Thanks for watching the front door. Let’s go.”
The things I’d get for watching the front door for Cindy included a big fifty cent lollipop she got from the school President who was selling them so the French club could fund their annual Spring Break trip to Paris, a big stinky kiss on my cheek right as we were waking up in the morning and my mom was putting on her makeup and my dad was making us eggs, an invitation to borrow one of her clothes and wear it to school on a day that wearing good clothes didn’t matter that much to her, like when she had gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays and she didn’t want to get her good clothes all sweaty.
It was a nice time for me. I loved Cindy, and I loved Dennis, and I think they both, might have loved me too.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
12-17-06
My sister is coming home for Christmas. It will be the first time in four years that we have all been together for our birthdays. I had a dream last night that we were triplets, the three of us, and mom put us in a suitcase with two dividers and rolled up through Flushing Meadow Park. When I was five, my dad used to take me to the park and our favorite thing to do was stand above other things. We walked on every bridge, ever extra step, climbed on the big rocks by the east end of the park, and we leaned over to look at the things beneath us—some grass, a bit of dirty water, a few ducks fighting over bread, other children and their fathers walking through the same world we lived in.
I could put my arms out now, as I walk downstairs to make myself a cup of instant noodles, and I would bump into every hanging picture, every ornament my mother has ever bought from a local merchant at a holiday fair, every Chinese saying that has ever been written on a wooden block and then sold to suckers to my mom and suckers like my dad who pays for it, and every thing that makes up this house would eventually touch my fingers, but I would come any closer to being part of this house. Is it possible to hang up memories like a painting, only invisible, and woven in like a sweater. Is it possible to wear a sweater that was all your favorite moments from childhood, and the way you remember your mother looked when you were in elementary school, the dresses she wore every time you celebrated a birthday or a graduation, or the first certificate anyone ever presented to you, even if it was just for not missing a single day of school, which was really because both your parents worked, and they didn’t have the money for a babysitter, so you had to go to work, even the time you felt like puking, and actually did, but at least you did on Suzie, the bitch with a twitch, and what else, what else.
I’m excited to see Cindy, but she hardly makes a blip in Dennis’ radar screen. He’s turning eight this year, and she’s been gone missing from half of his life so far. Next year, it will be more than half. When I was six I told Cindy I love the house we lived in when I was three, and that it was my favorite house. So she picked me up and pretended to try and throw me in the air, but I knew she couldn’t—she’s so weak she’d have trouble lifting Styrofoam, and she pulled me back down to her and held me against her shoulder, all of her hair was falling around me and I felt so happy putting my nose in her hair that I started to laugh and shake my head which hurt her because I have a really heavy head and she has really limp bones, but even still she was pleased with me and she asked me, “You loved that house? That ratty house? You thought it was better than this one?”
“Yes. I like that house better. This one’s boring.”
I love that memory, but I have to try and force myself to not remember it too often. The thing about memory is that it’s constantly updating itself. I have this feeling that the only reason I loved our old house—the first one I remember living in, covered in yellow printed wallpaper, that was later covered in oil from the foods my parents made, the house that was carpeted in the bedroom and covered with rugs in the living room, the house with a tiny backyard with tiny flowers, and all these small bugs that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere—is because back then, my sister still agreed to play with me. She dressed me up and took pictures of me. She wrapped a black scarf around my head and covered her eyes with our grandpa’s eyepatch that he wore in the morning sometimes because he had injured his left eye somehow, during the war, which war, we never knew, what sort of injury we never tried to find out, and she took pictures of me looking like that, happy to be her fool and test case. She let me sleep in her bed and she said, “Wrap your legs around me. It helps me sleep.” After we moved to the new house, she was worried all the time. Her pants were too baggy, the other girls had curly hair, no one gave her a ride after Art Club, she was always crying, things were always heavy, and I was alone for the first time, and after that, all the time.
If you want to know what my dad is like, ask someone else. He spends four hours of each working day on a train and on the weekends, sometimes, he drives into Manhattan and offers to take us along with him. When Dennis and I go, we sit in the very back and turn up the air conditioning and play go fish. I let Dennis win and when I say, “You’re really good Denny,” he says, “I know,” and then I want to unbuckle my seat belt and give him a big kiss. Sometimes, I do.
My dad’s works in the World Financial Center with all the other big suits, and women in heels. Every winter, my mom makes us pose right in front of the Christmas tree that stands tall at maybe nineteen or twenty feet and it stands up straight right in the middle of the ‘Winter Gardens,’ which is just a bunch of tropical plants under a glass ceiling. We always go in the winter to see the Winter Gardens, so the feeling of cold and iciness seems apt. The winter is the longest and saddest season in New York so everything that everthing that happens in the winter is sad. Even the good things are tinged with either an enhancing sadness or a detracting gloom. An example of a sadness that enhances a good thing is falling in love someone who doesn’t really love you but pretends to kind of love you.
_______________
I want to try again to explain my father. When he’s awake, he sits slumped in his bed, remote in hand, clicking through as many channels as we have. Sometimes, our parents stop paying for cable and then we only have five channels and every show has a laugh track. Othertimes, my father is in a good mood and we have sixty channels, and he always picks the ones that show old movies of Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris fighting a bunch of villains, and everyone has a twangy accent.
Could my father be that sort of hero? Severe, gruff, unknowable, altruistic, and altogether, the perfectly made man. Does he hold together our house, does he
I could put my arms out now, as I walk downstairs to make myself a cup of instant noodles, and I would bump into every hanging picture, every ornament my mother has ever bought from a local merchant at a holiday fair, every Chinese saying that has ever been written on a wooden block and then sold to suckers to my mom and suckers like my dad who pays for it, and every thing that makes up this house would eventually touch my fingers, but I would come any closer to being part of this house. Is it possible to hang up memories like a painting, only invisible, and woven in like a sweater. Is it possible to wear a sweater that was all your favorite moments from childhood, and the way you remember your mother looked when you were in elementary school, the dresses she wore every time you celebrated a birthday or a graduation, or the first certificate anyone ever presented to you, even if it was just for not missing a single day of school, which was really because both your parents worked, and they didn’t have the money for a babysitter, so you had to go to work, even the time you felt like puking, and actually did, but at least you did on Suzie, the bitch with a twitch, and what else, what else.
I’m excited to see Cindy, but she hardly makes a blip in Dennis’ radar screen. He’s turning eight this year, and she’s been gone missing from half of his life so far. Next year, it will be more than half. When I was six I told Cindy I love the house we lived in when I was three, and that it was my favorite house. So she picked me up and pretended to try and throw me in the air, but I knew she couldn’t—she’s so weak she’d have trouble lifting Styrofoam, and she pulled me back down to her and held me against her shoulder, all of her hair was falling around me and I felt so happy putting my nose in her hair that I started to laugh and shake my head which hurt her because I have a really heavy head and she has really limp bones, but even still she was pleased with me and she asked me, “You loved that house? That ratty house? You thought it was better than this one?”
“Yes. I like that house better. This one’s boring.”
I love that memory, but I have to try and force myself to not remember it too often. The thing about memory is that it’s constantly updating itself. I have this feeling that the only reason I loved our old house—the first one I remember living in, covered in yellow printed wallpaper, that was later covered in oil from the foods my parents made, the house that was carpeted in the bedroom and covered with rugs in the living room, the house with a tiny backyard with tiny flowers, and all these small bugs that came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere—is because back then, my sister still agreed to play with me. She dressed me up and took pictures of me. She wrapped a black scarf around my head and covered her eyes with our grandpa’s eyepatch that he wore in the morning sometimes because he had injured his left eye somehow, during the war, which war, we never knew, what sort of injury we never tried to find out, and she took pictures of me looking like that, happy to be her fool and test case. She let me sleep in her bed and she said, “Wrap your legs around me. It helps me sleep.” After we moved to the new house, she was worried all the time. Her pants were too baggy, the other girls had curly hair, no one gave her a ride after Art Club, she was always crying, things were always heavy, and I was alone for the first time, and after that, all the time.
If you want to know what my dad is like, ask someone else. He spends four hours of each working day on a train and on the weekends, sometimes, he drives into Manhattan and offers to take us along with him. When Dennis and I go, we sit in the very back and turn up the air conditioning and play go fish. I let Dennis win and when I say, “You’re really good Denny,” he says, “I know,” and then I want to unbuckle my seat belt and give him a big kiss. Sometimes, I do.
My dad’s works in the World Financial Center with all the other big suits, and women in heels. Every winter, my mom makes us pose right in front of the Christmas tree that stands tall at maybe nineteen or twenty feet and it stands up straight right in the middle of the ‘Winter Gardens,’ which is just a bunch of tropical plants under a glass ceiling. We always go in the winter to see the Winter Gardens, so the feeling of cold and iciness seems apt. The winter is the longest and saddest season in New York so everything that everthing that happens in the winter is sad. Even the good things are tinged with either an enhancing sadness or a detracting gloom. An example of a sadness that enhances a good thing is falling in love someone who doesn’t really love you but pretends to kind of love you.
_______________
I want to try again to explain my father. When he’s awake, he sits slumped in his bed, remote in hand, clicking through as many channels as we have. Sometimes, our parents stop paying for cable and then we only have five channels and every show has a laugh track. Othertimes, my father is in a good mood and we have sixty channels, and he always picks the ones that show old movies of Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris fighting a bunch of villains, and everyone has a twangy accent.
Could my father be that sort of hero? Severe, gruff, unknowable, altruistic, and altogether, the perfectly made man. Does he hold together our house, does he
Saturday, December 16, 2006
12-16-06
________________
My parents do this curious thing where they’ve moved themselves out to the United States of America, got themselves English-speaking jobs, moved into a whitewashed suburb, and then proceed to to to to to totot.
Can’t do this.
Don’t know why it’s so hard.
Sometimes, I want to write something, but no matter how it sounded in my head, or how I thought of writing it down while watching a man board the BART at 10 at night, and there is a particular smell that hyacinths take on in the evenings, and I know that smell because I walk past it every night on my way home. I have a dream, usually it’s a daydream that I have at night, that a boy I love will pick me fresh hyacinths and try to put them in my hair, although maybe that is the wrong kind of romance because I’m really allergic, and my hair is too baby fine to hold in a curl, or a flower.
I have dreams about summer in the winter because the winter is too long. My next door neighbors wears shorts in the winter. She has silver hair, no dogs, maybe a cat, but I’ve never seen it and wears Men in Black type Raybans. I read somewhere, in a supermarket that Raybans are making a comeback. It reminded me of going to the grocery store and meeting the woman with the beautiful curls and she has a nice smile, nice gold jewelry that I think she must be, at least, somewhat proud of. Next week, I’ll be playing poker, and the week after that, kneeling down besides my mother’s bed and watching the way her thumb flicks back and forth when she’s completely asleep.
_________________
My mother is so beautiful that last week in the parking lot, a man came up to her and said, “You’re beautiful. I do photographs for women who are beautiful in and in their forties and fifties. Please accept my card and consider the opportunity. I think you would catch the light of the camera beautifully.” But all she could think of was how he had been able to tell she was middle-aged. The adjectives that men had used to modify her were now being modified themselves. She was beautiful for a woman her age. She was as beautiful as a woman half her age. These sentences depressed her and so, in turn, they depressed me. I wanted her to be happy and so I would come home and tell her made up things.
“Eric Martin said you were the hottest woman he’s ever seen in his life. He made this digusting roofing sound. Like a dog. Yeah, he’s a dog. He’s got out it for you.”
“My friend Tim thought he was gay until he met you. It sounds wild doesn’t it? But he really was about to go gay until you came and picked me up from his house.”
These were not things so far-fetched from the truth. My friends did think my mother was beautiful. Tim would probably deny the fact that he’s flaming gay until age 25 at the earliest. For now, he’ll just keep getting blowjobs with his eyes sealed shut, maybe some nice pictures of buff dudes glued to the insides of his eyelids. My mother, for her part, bought it entirely. She did this thing where her eyes lit up and her eyeballs started doing mad laps around and around. It was like she was taking in every piece of wall and ceiling and floor in our house. Then she’d smell and say, “Hehehehehe!” The sound was really just that. “Hehehehehe!” was the sound that came out of her mouth and then composure. Her eyeballs returned to their original place in the center, she started talking about mundane things, charming, small things, and the only change was that her words would be newly infused with a ridiculously beautiful, golden happiness.
My parents do this curious thing where they’ve moved themselves out to the United States of America, got themselves English-speaking jobs, moved into a whitewashed suburb, and then proceed to to to to to totot.
Can’t do this.
Don’t know why it’s so hard.
Sometimes, I want to write something, but no matter how it sounded in my head, or how I thought of writing it down while watching a man board the BART at 10 at night, and there is a particular smell that hyacinths take on in the evenings, and I know that smell because I walk past it every night on my way home. I have a dream, usually it’s a daydream that I have at night, that a boy I love will pick me fresh hyacinths and try to put them in my hair, although maybe that is the wrong kind of romance because I’m really allergic, and my hair is too baby fine to hold in a curl, or a flower.
I have dreams about summer in the winter because the winter is too long. My next door neighbors wears shorts in the winter. She has silver hair, no dogs, maybe a cat, but I’ve never seen it and wears Men in Black type Raybans. I read somewhere, in a supermarket that Raybans are making a comeback. It reminded me of going to the grocery store and meeting the woman with the beautiful curls and she has a nice smile, nice gold jewelry that I think she must be, at least, somewhat proud of. Next week, I’ll be playing poker, and the week after that, kneeling down besides my mother’s bed and watching the way her thumb flicks back and forth when she’s completely asleep.
_________________
My mother is so beautiful that last week in the parking lot, a man came up to her and said, “You’re beautiful. I do photographs for women who are beautiful in and in their forties and fifties. Please accept my card and consider the opportunity. I think you would catch the light of the camera beautifully.” But all she could think of was how he had been able to tell she was middle-aged. The adjectives that men had used to modify her were now being modified themselves. She was beautiful for a woman her age. She was as beautiful as a woman half her age. These sentences depressed her and so, in turn, they depressed me. I wanted her to be happy and so I would come home and tell her made up things.
“Eric Martin said you were the hottest woman he’s ever seen in his life. He made this digusting roofing sound. Like a dog. Yeah, he’s a dog. He’s got out it for you.”
“My friend Tim thought he was gay until he met you. It sounds wild doesn’t it? But he really was about to go gay until you came and picked me up from his house.”
These were not things so far-fetched from the truth. My friends did think my mother was beautiful. Tim would probably deny the fact that he’s flaming gay until age 25 at the earliest. For now, he’ll just keep getting blowjobs with his eyes sealed shut, maybe some nice pictures of buff dudes glued to the insides of his eyelids. My mother, for her part, bought it entirely. She did this thing where her eyes lit up and her eyeballs started doing mad laps around and around. It was like she was taking in every piece of wall and ceiling and floor in our house. Then she’d smell and say, “Hehehehehe!” The sound was really just that. “Hehehehehe!” was the sound that came out of her mouth and then composure. Her eyeballs returned to their original place in the center, she started talking about mundane things, charming, small things, and the only change was that her words would be newly infused with a ridiculously beautiful, golden happiness.
Friday, December 15, 2006
12-15-06
When I tell Oscar that Cindy is coming home for Christmas, he practically pops a boner in his jeans and starts asking me all sorts of questions.
“How old is your sister again?”
“Twenty four.”
“So, is she bringing home—”
“Bringing home?”
“Yeah, is she bringing anyone home?”
“Like?”
“Like a boyfriend or fiancée or something.”
“She’s only twenty-four. Ever heard of the saying you’ve got to sow your wild oats?”
“Sew?”
“Yeah, sow.”
“So no boyfriend?”
“She has a boyfriend. I don’t know if he’s coming with her or not. Why, do you think you want and tap that, because you know, you couldn’t. Not if you tried, not if you paid her. Unless you had the kind of money like someone like Phil Knight.”
“Who?”
“The CEO of Nike.”
“What?”
“Well, Cindy can be a greedy bitch sometimes, so if you had that kind of cash, I bet she’d blow you.”
“Why do you always say stuff like that?”
“To get attention. Did it work?”
“Yeah. It’s really annoying.”
“And you’re desperate. Just because you want a wankjob from my sister.”
“You know, eventually you’re going to make everyone feel so awkward around you that people are just going to stop talking to you.”
“Fuck you Oscar. You’re not invited to my house for the party anymore. So fuck you.”
“Cecilia.”
“Fuck you.”
________________
“How old is your sister again?”
“Twenty four.”
“So, is she bringing home—”
“Bringing home?”
“Yeah, is she bringing anyone home?”
“Like?”
“Like a boyfriend or fiancée or something.”
“She’s only twenty-four. Ever heard of the saying you’ve got to sow your wild oats?”
“Sew?”
“Yeah, sow.”
“So no boyfriend?”
“She has a boyfriend. I don’t know if he’s coming with her or not. Why, do you think you want and tap that, because you know, you couldn’t. Not if you tried, not if you paid her. Unless you had the kind of money like someone like Phil Knight.”
“Who?”
“The CEO of Nike.”
“What?”
“Well, Cindy can be a greedy bitch sometimes, so if you had that kind of cash, I bet she’d blow you.”
“Why do you always say stuff like that?”
“To get attention. Did it work?”
“Yeah. It’s really annoying.”
“And you’re desperate. Just because you want a wankjob from my sister.”
“You know, eventually you’re going to make everyone feel so awkward around you that people are just going to stop talking to you.”
“Fuck you Oscar. You’re not invited to my house for the party anymore. So fuck you.”
“Cecilia.”
“Fuck you.”
________________
Thursday, December 14, 2006
12-14-06
It’s getting so bad that when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I say is, “Thank you God for letting me live one more day.” I don’t even believe in God. I have a statue of the High Priestess in real Jade in my bedroom. I put it in a box so I would never be tempted to kneel down in front of it and beg her to grant me the things I want.
I want so many things. I want my parents to live as long as I do. I want to live on and on and on and feel the things that I felt this week, the things I felt last week.
I HATE WHAT I JUST WROTE.AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
I want so many things. I want my parents to live as long as I do. I want to live on and on and on and feel the things that I felt this week, the things I felt last week.
I HATE WHAT I JUST WROTE.AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
12-13-06
I started to write the video store clerk a letter as well, although I didn’t know his name so I addressed it to, “The boy I have loved ever since I moved into this crappy, shithole, no-future-whatsoever-in-store-for-me-here town,” and I meant it completely. I had decided early on that I would agree to have sex with Mr. Clarke, if he ever asked, I would do it in a heartbeat, I’d do it doggy-style, if that was his prerogative. As for the Hanson brothers, I’d have no problem jacking all three of them off simultaneously, and if they were into kinky shit, I’d oblige that too, nipple clamps, stiletto heels, laying out on the beach, the whole nine yards, hard-core porno style and everything.
I had no trouble imaging these scenarios and mentioned my willingness to do them in my letters, with some edits. (I ended up including the three handjobs at once thing, but omitted the bit about nipple clamps, and I was too chicken-shit to write the word ‘doggy-style’ in a letter to one of my favorite teachers, but I did implore him to come back to new York and have sex with in his car, or any other discreet location.) Of course, at the time when I was writing these letters, the most experience I had ever had was kissing my ninth-grade boyfriend, who drew X’s on his wrists every morning before going to work with magic marker, and when the jocks slapped him in the hallway and said, “You probably die of ink poisoning before you get around to committing suicide,” (which I found to be an unusually astute observation for that crowd), on the cheek, outside of Computer Science class, and the second thing of significance was the time when I ripped my hand away from his when he had tried to put it over his hard-one during Chasing Amy. We broke up shortly after that. He was a fucking perv.
My fantasies of the video store clerk were entirely pure. I counted the number of times he smiled at me when I in the store, and sometimes I lurked and watched out of the corner of my eye the number of times he smiled at the other girls in the store. One time, I counted seven smiles and I was so very happy because seven was a lucky number, and I also happened to like its shape very much. In fact, I was so happy that I shouted “I love him, I really really love him,” in my room and my mom ran in and asked me why I was shouting when other people were trying to sleep and I was too embarrassed to tell her so we got into an argument instead and we made each other cry.
She asked me, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course I am. Now get out, would you? How would you like it if I ran into your room whenever I felt like it without asking, or knocking first?”
“You disrupt the things I do all the time. Also, please don’t forget that I’m also your mother.”
“That doesn’t take away my right to a little bit of privacy.”
“A little bit of privacy? Look at you. You’re a spoiled brat. You have this entire room to yourself, we give you an allowance every week, you get to lock this door whenever you want, and then when dinner’s ready, you get to come down and eat and then you come back up to your room and ignore your family. Look at how much you have, and you’re still whining.”
“And look how self-absorbed you are, mom. You never even try to listen or understand the things I say—”
“Don’t talk to your mom like that.” When my mom said that, I always knew that we were headed for a bad turn. It usually signaled the end. She would follow it up with a something like, “I’m your mom and I don’t care,” or “You have to do anything I say,” or “I’m right. You’re wrong. Apologize now.” I knew the argument was over but I was feeling bold.
“You can’t just end the argument with that. It’s not fair. It’s not even relevant.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying. Relevant? What do you mean relevant?” Nothing angered my mother more than when I used an English word she didn’t understand. She fought with me in Chinese and I fought back in my broken Chinese-English mish-mash, going heavy on the English when I thought I had a chance to humiliate or trump her.
“It means instead of just responding to what I say, you end the argument by declaring you’re mom and that’s that.”
“Right. That’s that. Apologize now to your mother. Apologize to me and say that you were wrong.”
That was when I started crying, and later, she cried too because I wouldn’t apologize. All that just for a boy who smelled a little bit like the rubber tip on a #2 eraser.
____________
Cindy is coming home in two weeks and my mind is still fixated on death. My friend Diana says it’s a morbid curiosity, but it’s not that. It’s not as if I’m interested in people who are dying, or the physical aspects of death. It’s not like I’m fascinated by it and can’t look away when I see in the newspapers, or on TV, or anywhere else. I just can’t stop myself from being afraid of it. Sometimes, I sit up in the middle of class, and I just can’t get myself to listen to anything the teacher is saying. I just think about what it’s like to no longer have feelings, to be asleep forever, and I go home and slap myself all night long because I don’t want to fall asleep, I don’t want to do anything is would be similar to being dead, I don’t want to feel nothing for eight hours, or is it I don’t want to not feel, so I slap myself all night long, sneak off to the bathroom with a book underneath my nightgown and read it on the toilet so I can stay awake.
I quickly realize that the only thing that gets my mind off the subject of death is constant and nonstop masturbation. In health class, we have an entire discussion about why men masturbate more than women, and all the girls in the class, except Mickey Ravener, the token slutty girl, make a big fuss about how they never masturbate, and all the boys get uproarious and shout out the number of times they masturbate in a day.
“Three!”
“Four!”
“Five!”
“Six, or until it starts to chafe!”
“Until it becomes numb!”
“Until I’m jazzing blood!”
I feel embarrassed that I’ve started to masturbate just about every night now, and when I wake up, I do it again. It sounds ridiculous, but I’m afraid if I don’t, then I’ll start to think about my death again.
I tell Cindy on the phone about my death fixation, but I don’t tell her about the masturbation, and she responds by telling me I’m self-obsessed.
“Well obviously, everyone is afraid of dying.”
“Not everyone,” I tell her on the phone. “This kid in my class Marty claims he’s not afraid of what happens after death—”
“What, is he a devout Christian or something?”
“No, he’s an atheist actually. And the reason is because he says if you weren’t afraid of not being born, and if death is the like the mirror image of not being born, which is not being alive, then you can’t be afraid of that either.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Well the point’s that not everyone is afraid of death.”
“Well, everyone is afraid of death. Deep down. Of course they would be. But, it’ just so typical of you that you, at age 15 would be afraid to die, when you actually know people like Grandma and Grandpa who probably three breaths away from actually dying, and instead of worrying about missing them when they are gone, you worry about yourself. And what about mom and dad? Their lives are half over.”
Cindy depresses the hell out of me sometimes, and I want to tell her that she’s older than me, she has at least some sort of responsibility to me, blah blah blah don’t know how to end this sentence.
I had no trouble imaging these scenarios and mentioned my willingness to do them in my letters, with some edits. (I ended up including the three handjobs at once thing, but omitted the bit about nipple clamps, and I was too chicken-shit to write the word ‘doggy-style’ in a letter to one of my favorite teachers, but I did implore him to come back to new York and have sex with in his car, or any other discreet location.) Of course, at the time when I was writing these letters, the most experience I had ever had was kissing my ninth-grade boyfriend, who drew X’s on his wrists every morning before going to work with magic marker, and when the jocks slapped him in the hallway and said, “You probably die of ink poisoning before you get around to committing suicide,” (which I found to be an unusually astute observation for that crowd), on the cheek, outside of Computer Science class, and the second thing of significance was the time when I ripped my hand away from his when he had tried to put it over his hard-one during Chasing Amy. We broke up shortly after that. He was a fucking perv.
My fantasies of the video store clerk were entirely pure. I counted the number of times he smiled at me when I in the store, and sometimes I lurked and watched out of the corner of my eye the number of times he smiled at the other girls in the store. One time, I counted seven smiles and I was so very happy because seven was a lucky number, and I also happened to like its shape very much. In fact, I was so happy that I shouted “I love him, I really really love him,” in my room and my mom ran in and asked me why I was shouting when other people were trying to sleep and I was too embarrassed to tell her so we got into an argument instead and we made each other cry.
She asked me, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course I am. Now get out, would you? How would you like it if I ran into your room whenever I felt like it without asking, or knocking first?”
“You disrupt the things I do all the time. Also, please don’t forget that I’m also your mother.”
“That doesn’t take away my right to a little bit of privacy.”
“A little bit of privacy? Look at you. You’re a spoiled brat. You have this entire room to yourself, we give you an allowance every week, you get to lock this door whenever you want, and then when dinner’s ready, you get to come down and eat and then you come back up to your room and ignore your family. Look at how much you have, and you’re still whining.”
“And look how self-absorbed you are, mom. You never even try to listen or understand the things I say—”
“Don’t talk to your mom like that.” When my mom said that, I always knew that we were headed for a bad turn. It usually signaled the end. She would follow it up with a something like, “I’m your mom and I don’t care,” or “You have to do anything I say,” or “I’m right. You’re wrong. Apologize now.” I knew the argument was over but I was feeling bold.
“You can’t just end the argument with that. It’s not fair. It’s not even relevant.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying. Relevant? What do you mean relevant?” Nothing angered my mother more than when I used an English word she didn’t understand. She fought with me in Chinese and I fought back in my broken Chinese-English mish-mash, going heavy on the English when I thought I had a chance to humiliate or trump her.
“It means instead of just responding to what I say, you end the argument by declaring you’re mom and that’s that.”
“Right. That’s that. Apologize now to your mother. Apologize to me and say that you were wrong.”
That was when I started crying, and later, she cried too because I wouldn’t apologize. All that just for a boy who smelled a little bit like the rubber tip on a #2 eraser.
____________
Cindy is coming home in two weeks and my mind is still fixated on death. My friend Diana says it’s a morbid curiosity, but it’s not that. It’s not as if I’m interested in people who are dying, or the physical aspects of death. It’s not like I’m fascinated by it and can’t look away when I see in the newspapers, or on TV, or anywhere else. I just can’t stop myself from being afraid of it. Sometimes, I sit up in the middle of class, and I just can’t get myself to listen to anything the teacher is saying. I just think about what it’s like to no longer have feelings, to be asleep forever, and I go home and slap myself all night long because I don’t want to fall asleep, I don’t want to do anything is would be similar to being dead, I don’t want to feel nothing for eight hours, or is it I don’t want to not feel, so I slap myself all night long, sneak off to the bathroom with a book underneath my nightgown and read it on the toilet so I can stay awake.
I quickly realize that the only thing that gets my mind off the subject of death is constant and nonstop masturbation. In health class, we have an entire discussion about why men masturbate more than women, and all the girls in the class, except Mickey Ravener, the token slutty girl, make a big fuss about how they never masturbate, and all the boys get uproarious and shout out the number of times they masturbate in a day.
“Three!”
“Four!”
“Five!”
“Six, or until it starts to chafe!”
“Until it becomes numb!”
“Until I’m jazzing blood!”
I feel embarrassed that I’ve started to masturbate just about every night now, and when I wake up, I do it again. It sounds ridiculous, but I’m afraid if I don’t, then I’ll start to think about my death again.
I tell Cindy on the phone about my death fixation, but I don’t tell her about the masturbation, and she responds by telling me I’m self-obsessed.
“Well obviously, everyone is afraid of dying.”
“Not everyone,” I tell her on the phone. “This kid in my class Marty claims he’s not afraid of what happens after death—”
“What, is he a devout Christian or something?”
“No, he’s an atheist actually. And the reason is because he says if you weren’t afraid of not being born, and if death is the like the mirror image of not being born, which is not being alive, then you can’t be afraid of that either.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Well the point’s that not everyone is afraid of death.”
“Well, everyone is afraid of death. Deep down. Of course they would be. But, it’ just so typical of you that you, at age 15 would be afraid to die, when you actually know people like Grandma and Grandpa who probably three breaths away from actually dying, and instead of worrying about missing them when they are gone, you worry about yourself. And what about mom and dad? Their lives are half over.”
Cindy depresses the hell out of me sometimes, and I want to tell her that she’s older than me, she has at least some sort of responsibility to me, blah blah blah don’t know how to end this sentence.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
12-12-06
On the day my brother was born, I was exactly nine years old, and my friend Hanzhi, who later changed his name to Harry, was eight years and some months, and it was a beautiful time because no one had started to make fun of us yet for being best friends (we had about a year and half of this bliss left), even though we were basically asking for the ridicule with our role-playing games. They all went along the lines of: I was his wife, he was handsome, I had a sharp wit, he had good arms, I knew an impressive amount of words, he could bench 250, we served in the secret service and had committed to spending our entire lives trying to vanquish enemies from the outside, and traitors from within (his dad and my dad of course, and their code names were Diarrhea Daddy, and Constipation Papa), and after we completed a mission (usually took about an afternoon’s time) we would pretend to sleep like husband and wife, and since we were so hyper all the time and would exert massive amounts of energy in trying to capture Diarrhea Daddy and Constipation Papa, whenever we ‘pretended’ to sleep, we would actually fall asleep, and all the grown-ups fawned at us, stood over us and whispered annoying things like, “They’re little monsters when they’re awake, but look how beautiful they look now,” as if we were better unconscious, as if the most beautiful state we could ever achieve was akin to being in a coma!
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was in a junior in high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of the grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why she would want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a shithole.”
On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas, also known as Cindy and mine joint birthday. I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please, please, please not forget to get me a real present, two real presents, one real present for Christmas, and one real present for my birhday, if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on my/Cindy’s/Jesus, son of God’s birthday. But, despite all that, I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not digest properly because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekend, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of giant cylindrical presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born.” Hanzhi crumpled one of his pictures and threw it at my face. “He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano. My mom made me do one full hour, and it didn’t matter if I did in the morning or afternoon. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I was cute all morning, my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
I was mad at my mom and I decided I would not practice piano that day. She had broken her promise to me, and later she would probably say something like, “No, I never promised you that. No, I didn’t,” and she would make me cry and I would not have anything to say back because she was my mom, and she always had to have the final say. I said good-morning to Hanzhi’s mom and she hugged me tightly, her dirty apron getting on my cheek.
“You must be so happy, Cici,” she said in Chinese. “Your family is the first family to have three children.” She shook her head and looked away for a minute, “Well. Some couples don’t even have one child yet. You have to wonder why some people aren’t trying to have children when they are getting on in their age. They’ll be crying alone, with no children, no grandchildren come retirement age.” She hugged me again and I tried my best to crane my neck away from the spilt soy sauce on her apron.
I ran up the stairs to find Cindy. I wanted to pounce on her, with the stink of a night’s sleep still on my breath and yell into her face, “We have a baby brother!” but when I threw open her doors there was no one there. I had been left along in the house. They woke up Cindy and took her with them to the hospital, but they left me and called up Hanzhi’s mom. I was hopping mad. I read a children’s book once about why bees sting human, and the tale was extremely sympathetic towards bees, and had a tone of disdain for humans that I only picked up on many year later when I was cleaning out my old storybooks. Towards the end of the book, there was an illustration of a bee that had been provoked by a thoughtless human and the bee had slits for eyes and was diving, stinger pointed southward, into a beefy, red-faced kid’s arm. For all intensive purposes, when my brother was born, I felt like a pissed off bee, and I zipped through the rooms of our house hitting all the things I could hit without getting in trouble: my parent’s mattress, my sister’s mattress, the clothes hanging in both of their closets, all of my own stuff, including a Clue board that I ripped in half and was never able to tape back together properly.
____________
On the day my sister went to college, I started writing letters to people I wanted to meet. First, I wrote a letter to Hansen, the washed-out teen band I once had a sex dream about. I woke up with my hands dug into my underwear and felt so ashamed that I took two showers in a row, then went outside and dirtied my hands with dirt from the backyard and went back and took another shower. I started off the letter like this:
Dear Hanson brothers!
Dear Hanson trio!
A trio of brothers!
Hanson bros!
Trio of bros!
Tro bros!
I’m writing to you today in hopes that I will sound crazy enough that whoever sorts through your mail, (probably someone who looks like me, is the same age as me and is in your immediate family, in which case, it would not actually look like me since I’m not blond, blue-eyed, or a white girl!) will find me interesting and startling enough that they will pass this letter on to you.
I don’t normally like to look back at my diary entries once I’ve written them. I especially would not like to look back at my seventh and eighth grade diary entries, but if I did, I would probably find a few entries that are trying to be all deep and pose the question, “Can you love someone you never met before?” Obviously, what I was really getting at was: is it weird that I want to have mad wild sex with Taylor Hansen, and if not Taylor, then okay, I’ll take Ike because he’s got a good name and I could do with an older man, and if not Taylor or Ike, then fine, I’ll take Zach even though he sings like my brother and I’d rather not be thinking of my brother while boning a Hansen brother.
I also wrote letters to Denzel Washington, Devon Sawa, Posh Spice, the English teacher who left my school when I was tenth grade, who I thought once touched my arm and lingered there and another time, I thought maybe he was giving me the once-over during exam week when it was hotter than a baked turkey and I wore my old green shorts that were too small for me. I thought for sure when he asked me to stay behind at the end of class, he was going to shut the door, pull down the blinds, and whip out his dick, and I had it all figured out—I would confidently say, “I wore a special bra today. I was hoping you’d get to see it,” and he would rip off my bra, (because he could care less about what I was wearing compared to the wild passionate fucking we were about to engage in), but it turned out in the end, that he just wanted to congratulate me on my excellent scores and performance this year and that I should feel free to call him or write him next year when I was a junior and he was teaching a bunch of private school fuckheads in Southern California the multiple dimensions of Hemingway’s imperialist ambitions. I kept his address in a box with the Kleenex pack the video store clerk gave me when I first moved into this town.
I wrote the video store clerk a letter too even though I didn’t know his name so I addressed it to, “The boy I have loved ever since I moved into this crappy, shithole, no-future-whatsoever-in-store-for-me-here town,” and I meant it completely. I would have sex with Mr. Clarke, I’d let him do me doggy-style, I would jack off all three Hanson brother simultaneously, and if they were into kinky shit, then I’d wear nipple clamps and high heels, and I’d lay out on the beach, hard-core porno style and enhance my boob with some kind of miracle bra or whatever, and all this, I decided I was perfectly comfortable with and considered including in my letters (I ended up including the three handjobs at once but omitting the nipple clamps, and I was afraid to use the word ‘doggy-style’ in a letter to one of my favorite teachers, but I did implore him to come back to New York and have sex with me in his car) even though I did not want to admit to myself that the most experience I had at that point was kissing my ninth-grade boyfriend on the cheek outside of Computer Science class, and ripped my hand away from his when he had put it over his hard-on during Chasing Amy. He was a fucking perv.
But my fantasies of the video store clerk were entirely pure. I counted the number of times he smiled at me when I was in the store, and sometimes I lurked and watched out of the corner of my eye the number of times he smiled at the other girls in the store. One time, I counted seven smiles and I was so happy because seven was also a lucky number, that I shouted, “I love him,” in my room and my mom ran in and looked at me with furrowed eyebrows.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, get out, would you? How would you like it if I just ran into your room when you were trying to do something private?”
“You do that all the time, and I’m also your mother.”
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was in a junior in high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of the grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why she would want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a shithole.”
On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas, also known as Cindy and mine joint birthday. I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please, please, please not forget to get me a real present, two real presents, one real present for Christmas, and one real present for my birhday, if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on my/Cindy’s/Jesus, son of God’s birthday. But, despite all that, I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not digest properly because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekend, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of giant cylindrical presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born.” Hanzhi crumpled one of his pictures and threw it at my face. “He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano. My mom made me do one full hour, and it didn’t matter if I did in the morning or afternoon. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I was cute all morning, my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
I was mad at my mom and I decided I would not practice piano that day. She had broken her promise to me, and later she would probably say something like, “No, I never promised you that. No, I didn’t,” and she would make me cry and I would not have anything to say back because she was my mom, and she always had to have the final say. I said good-morning to Hanzhi’s mom and she hugged me tightly, her dirty apron getting on my cheek.
“You must be so happy, Cici,” she said in Chinese. “Your family is the first family to have three children.” She shook her head and looked away for a minute, “Well. Some couples don’t even have one child yet. You have to wonder why some people aren’t trying to have children when they are getting on in their age. They’ll be crying alone, with no children, no grandchildren come retirement age.” She hugged me again and I tried my best to crane my neck away from the spilt soy sauce on her apron.
I ran up the stairs to find Cindy. I wanted to pounce on her, with the stink of a night’s sleep still on my breath and yell into her face, “We have a baby brother!” but when I threw open her doors there was no one there. I had been left along in the house. They woke up Cindy and took her with them to the hospital, but they left me and called up Hanzhi’s mom. I was hopping mad. I read a children’s book once about why bees sting human, and the tale was extremely sympathetic towards bees, and had a tone of disdain for humans that I only picked up on many year later when I was cleaning out my old storybooks. Towards the end of the book, there was an illustration of a bee that had been provoked by a thoughtless human and the bee had slits for eyes and was diving, stinger pointed southward, into a beefy, red-faced kid’s arm. For all intensive purposes, when my brother was born, I felt like a pissed off bee, and I zipped through the rooms of our house hitting all the things I could hit without getting in trouble: my parent’s mattress, my sister’s mattress, the clothes hanging in both of their closets, all of my own stuff, including a Clue board that I ripped in half and was never able to tape back together properly.
____________
On the day my sister went to college, I started writing letters to people I wanted to meet. First, I wrote a letter to Hansen, the washed-out teen band I once had a sex dream about. I woke up with my hands dug into my underwear and felt so ashamed that I took two showers in a row, then went outside and dirtied my hands with dirt from the backyard and went back and took another shower. I started off the letter like this:
Dear Hanson brothers!
Dear Hanson trio!
A trio of brothers!
Hanson bros!
Trio of bros!
Tro bros!
I’m writing to you today in hopes that I will sound crazy enough that whoever sorts through your mail, (probably someone who looks like me, is the same age as me and is in your immediate family, in which case, it would not actually look like me since I’m not blond, blue-eyed, or a white girl!) will find me interesting and startling enough that they will pass this letter on to you.
I don’t normally like to look back at my diary entries once I’ve written them. I especially would not like to look back at my seventh and eighth grade diary entries, but if I did, I would probably find a few entries that are trying to be all deep and pose the question, “Can you love someone you never met before?” Obviously, what I was really getting at was: is it weird that I want to have mad wild sex with Taylor Hansen, and if not Taylor, then okay, I’ll take Ike because he’s got a good name and I could do with an older man, and if not Taylor or Ike, then fine, I’ll take Zach even though he sings like my brother and I’d rather not be thinking of my brother while boning a Hansen brother.
I also wrote letters to Denzel Washington, Devon Sawa, Posh Spice, the English teacher who left my school when I was tenth grade, who I thought once touched my arm and lingered there and another time, I thought maybe he was giving me the once-over during exam week when it was hotter than a baked turkey and I wore my old green shorts that were too small for me. I thought for sure when he asked me to stay behind at the end of class, he was going to shut the door, pull down the blinds, and whip out his dick, and I had it all figured out—I would confidently say, “I wore a special bra today. I was hoping you’d get to see it,” and he would rip off my bra, (because he could care less about what I was wearing compared to the wild passionate fucking we were about to engage in), but it turned out in the end, that he just wanted to congratulate me on my excellent scores and performance this year and that I should feel free to call him or write him next year when I was a junior and he was teaching a bunch of private school fuckheads in Southern California the multiple dimensions of Hemingway’s imperialist ambitions. I kept his address in a box with the Kleenex pack the video store clerk gave me when I first moved into this town.
I wrote the video store clerk a letter too even though I didn’t know his name so I addressed it to, “The boy I have loved ever since I moved into this crappy, shithole, no-future-whatsoever-in-store-for-me-here town,” and I meant it completely. I would have sex with Mr. Clarke, I’d let him do me doggy-style, I would jack off all three Hanson brother simultaneously, and if they were into kinky shit, then I’d wear nipple clamps and high heels, and I’d lay out on the beach, hard-core porno style and enhance my boob with some kind of miracle bra or whatever, and all this, I decided I was perfectly comfortable with and considered including in my letters (I ended up including the three handjobs at once but omitting the nipple clamps, and I was afraid to use the word ‘doggy-style’ in a letter to one of my favorite teachers, but I did implore him to come back to New York and have sex with me in his car) even though I did not want to admit to myself that the most experience I had at that point was kissing my ninth-grade boyfriend on the cheek outside of Computer Science class, and ripped my hand away from his when he had put it over his hard-on during Chasing Amy. He was a fucking perv.
But my fantasies of the video store clerk were entirely pure. I counted the number of times he smiled at me when I was in the store, and sometimes I lurked and watched out of the corner of my eye the number of times he smiled at the other girls in the store. One time, I counted seven smiles and I was so happy because seven was also a lucky number, that I shouted, “I love him,” in my room and my mom ran in and looked at me with furrowed eyebrows.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, get out, would you? How would you like it if I just ran into your room when you were trying to do something private?”
“You do that all the time, and I’m also your mother.”
Monday, December 11, 2006
12-11-06
On the day my sister went to college, I started writing letters to people I wanted to meet. First, I wrote a letter to Hanson, the washed-out teen band I think I once had a sex dream about. I woke up with my hands dug into my underwear and felt so ashamed, I took two showers in a row, then went outside and dirtied my hands with dirt from the backyard and went back and took another shower. I started off the letter like this:
Dear Hansen brothers!
Dear Hansen trio!
A trio of brothers!
Hansen bros!
Trio of bros!
Tro bros!
I’m writing to you today in hopes that I will sound crazy enough that whoever sorts through your mail, (probably someone who looks like me, is the same age as me and is in your immediate family, in which case, it would not actually look like me since I’m not blond, blue-eyed, or a white girl!) will find me interesting and startling enough that they will pass this letter on to you.
I don’t normally like to look back at my diary entries once I’ve written them. I especially would not like to look back at my seventh and eighth grade diary entries, but if I did, I would probably find a few entries that try to be all deep and pose the question, “Can you love someone you never met before?” Obviously, what I was really getting at was: is it weird that I want to have mad wild sex with Taylor Hansen, and if not Taylor, well okay I’ll take Ike because he’s got a good name and I could do with an older man, and if not Taylor or Ike, then fine, I’ll take Zach even though he sings like my brother and I’d rather not be thinking of my brother while boning a Hansen brother.
I also wrote letters to Denzel Washington, Devon Sawa, Posh Spice, the English teacher who left my school when I was tenth grade, who I thought once touched my arm and lingered there and another time, I thought maybe he was giving me the once over during exam week when it was hotter than a baked turkey and I wore my old green shorts that were too small for me. I thought for sure when he asked me to stay behind at the end of class, he was going to shut the door, pull down the blinds, and whip out his dick, and I had it all figured out: I would confidently say, “I wore a special bra today. I was hoping you’d get to see it,” and he would rip off my bra, (because he could care less about what I was wearing compared to the wild passionate fucking we were about to engage in), but it turned out in the end, that he just wanted to congratulate me on my excellent scores and performance this year and that I should feel free to call him or write him next year when I was a junior and he was teaching a bunch of private school fuckheads Hemingway’s imperialist ambitions in Southern California. I kept his address in a box along with the mini-pack of Kleenex pack the video store clerk gave me when I first moved into this town.
The letter I wrote my English teacher went like this:
Dear Mr. Clarke,
Hi, do you remember me? I used to sit way up in the front and the girls behind me sometimes threw thing at me, like shipping peanuts. Sometimes, I would walk into class with glassy eyes. I had long straight black hair, and no matter summer or winter, I would always wear a skirt to class. If you remember me then you might not want to keep reading this letter.
I wanted you to notice me when I crossed my legs at the front of the class, and I wanted you to notice me when I raised my hands and waited an extra second before speaking because I had seen my older sister do that, and boys go wild for her. I practiced lowering my voice at home by reading Daisy’s lines from The Great Gatbsy, which you said was the greatest book ever written, and to be honest, I read it and didn’t think much of it except what an exciting life Daisy led, and how Fitzgerald wrote her character with such disdain and admiration, and how spoiled she seemed through and through, and how I didn’t want to read another book about rich people who think they have it hard in their head. You taught us not to use clichés, and isn’t it a cliché—the whole idea that just because you are rich in material wealth does not mean you are rich in emotional wealth. The only reason they make shows like Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 is because they want people who would otherwise feel pissed off about being poor have some illusion that being rich isn’t all that, and actually it’s quite tough to have a million bucks at your disposal because your daddy don’t love you, your mommy only loves jewels, etc, whatever.
I didn’t mean to get into a tangent (another thing you told us to not do, in our manner of speaking, or in our essays, and I had raised my hand, do you remember, and I asked, “Then how come when Joyce or Jane Austen does it, it’s considered wonderful and intriguing, and important to the development of the English canon,” and you had said, “Well, there is an overused saying that goes, you have to know the rules to break them,” and I was not satisfied with your answer but I was sort of aroused and excited and I wanted you to see that, to see the fire and vigor I had for you and for your class.) The whole time you were teaching us I wanted so badly for you want me and think about me, and I dreamed of you during the day, sometimes inadvertently at night. During the day, I had strange daydreams about you because I didn’t dream about being with you, or being kissed by you as much as I dreamed about you dreaming of me, and of you fantasizing about me, so I guess in a way you could call me really narcissist or a special form of lesbian (does that turn you on by the way?)
I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish with these letters, but I kept writing them. I included my real return address, and felt absolutely petrified when I licked shut the letter to Mr. Clarke. I covered my eyes with one hand like I did during horror films as I dropped his letter into the post office box. I nearly screamed as I slammed the handle shut and heard the sound of my envelope sliding down onto the other letters and packages.
Dear Hansen brothers!
Dear Hansen trio!
A trio of brothers!
Hansen bros!
Trio of bros!
Tro bros!
I’m writing to you today in hopes that I will sound crazy enough that whoever sorts through your mail, (probably someone who looks like me, is the same age as me and is in your immediate family, in which case, it would not actually look like me since I’m not blond, blue-eyed, or a white girl!) will find me interesting and startling enough that they will pass this letter on to you.
I don’t normally like to look back at my diary entries once I’ve written them. I especially would not like to look back at my seventh and eighth grade diary entries, but if I did, I would probably find a few entries that try to be all deep and pose the question, “Can you love someone you never met before?” Obviously, what I was really getting at was: is it weird that I want to have mad wild sex with Taylor Hansen, and if not Taylor, well okay I’ll take Ike because he’s got a good name and I could do with an older man, and if not Taylor or Ike, then fine, I’ll take Zach even though he sings like my brother and I’d rather not be thinking of my brother while boning a Hansen brother.
I also wrote letters to Denzel Washington, Devon Sawa, Posh Spice, the English teacher who left my school when I was tenth grade, who I thought once touched my arm and lingered there and another time, I thought maybe he was giving me the once over during exam week when it was hotter than a baked turkey and I wore my old green shorts that were too small for me. I thought for sure when he asked me to stay behind at the end of class, he was going to shut the door, pull down the blinds, and whip out his dick, and I had it all figured out: I would confidently say, “I wore a special bra today. I was hoping you’d get to see it,” and he would rip off my bra, (because he could care less about what I was wearing compared to the wild passionate fucking we were about to engage in), but it turned out in the end, that he just wanted to congratulate me on my excellent scores and performance this year and that I should feel free to call him or write him next year when I was a junior and he was teaching a bunch of private school fuckheads Hemingway’s imperialist ambitions in Southern California. I kept his address in a box along with the mini-pack of Kleenex pack the video store clerk gave me when I first moved into this town.
The letter I wrote my English teacher went like this:
Dear Mr. Clarke,
Hi, do you remember me? I used to sit way up in the front and the girls behind me sometimes threw thing at me, like shipping peanuts. Sometimes, I would walk into class with glassy eyes. I had long straight black hair, and no matter summer or winter, I would always wear a skirt to class. If you remember me then you might not want to keep reading this letter.
I wanted you to notice me when I crossed my legs at the front of the class, and I wanted you to notice me when I raised my hands and waited an extra second before speaking because I had seen my older sister do that, and boys go wild for her. I practiced lowering my voice at home by reading Daisy’s lines from The Great Gatbsy, which you said was the greatest book ever written, and to be honest, I read it and didn’t think much of it except what an exciting life Daisy led, and how Fitzgerald wrote her character with such disdain and admiration, and how spoiled she seemed through and through, and how I didn’t want to read another book about rich people who think they have it hard in their head. You taught us not to use clichés, and isn’t it a cliché—the whole idea that just because you are rich in material wealth does not mean you are rich in emotional wealth. The only reason they make shows like Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210 is because they want people who would otherwise feel pissed off about being poor have some illusion that being rich isn’t all that, and actually it’s quite tough to have a million bucks at your disposal because your daddy don’t love you, your mommy only loves jewels, etc, whatever.
I didn’t mean to get into a tangent (another thing you told us to not do, in our manner of speaking, or in our essays, and I had raised my hand, do you remember, and I asked, “Then how come when Joyce or Jane Austen does it, it’s considered wonderful and intriguing, and important to the development of the English canon,” and you had said, “Well, there is an overused saying that goes, you have to know the rules to break them,” and I was not satisfied with your answer but I was sort of aroused and excited and I wanted you to see that, to see the fire and vigor I had for you and for your class.) The whole time you were teaching us I wanted so badly for you want me and think about me, and I dreamed of you during the day, sometimes inadvertently at night. During the day, I had strange daydreams about you because I didn’t dream about being with you, or being kissed by you as much as I dreamed about you dreaming of me, and of you fantasizing about me, so I guess in a way you could call me really narcissist or a special form of lesbian (does that turn you on by the way?)
I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish with these letters, but I kept writing them. I included my real return address, and felt absolutely petrified when I licked shut the letter to Mr. Clarke. I covered my eyes with one hand like I did during horror films as I dropped his letter into the post office box. I nearly screamed as I slammed the handle shut and heard the sound of my envelope sliding down onto the other letters and packages.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
12-10-06
_____________
None of us forget each other’s birthdays because we were all born on the same day: December 25. Cindy is five years older than me, and I’m seven years older than Dennis. Cindy and I used to kiss him simultaneously, her on his left and me on his right cheek. We smushed him with this immense love that I still feel, but I guess don’t act out. We called it the Flattening Love Experiments. I don’t know who came up with the name. It sounds stupid now.
[More].
_____________
I lived on a small street off of rue de la Roquette. The falafel stands stayed open long past the bars—the men who manned them were constantly paying off debts, and they took breaks in between stuffing fries and slices of shaved lamb into pita bread to hoot at the girls.
“Bonjour Mademoiselles. Tres belle. Tres tres belle.”
“Aw, vous etes toute seule?”
“Bonjour petite chinoise. Bonjour. Hello? Hello.” I flushed the first time they spoke to me. I was walking down the rue de la Roquette on my own and one of the men grabbed my arm and pulled me to him.
“Excusez-moi mademoiselle.” I pulled my arm away and looked at a faraway, nonexistent object. My legs were going so slow.
“Excusez-moi. Petite chinoise, excusez-moi.”
After that, I learned that the whistling, the constant badgering, the way a man would follow you down a dark alley, would walk blocks with you and continue on more blocks even if you did not say anything, even if you did not breathe in his direction. The city was teaching me each day what to expect, the lifelessness and tediousness of learning a country’s customs and realizing that the things you found odd and strange were not strange at all, but just so commonplace that you yourself were the definition and example of triteness just by thinking the things you thought before someone came along and englightened you.
In Paris, I fell in love with a boy who worked the night shift at an English-language bookstore. There was another boy who played the violin and he said things like, “Oh of course, life is madness. But there is,” and then he would play something squeaky and ridiculously sentimental on his guitar, “some love and joy to be found in even the most maddening things.”
“Ha, ha,” I had said the first time I met him. “What other imitations do you do besides this one?”
“That’s not an imitation, you twat.” I ran away as fast as I could and ran the entire length home, slowing down when I thought one of the falafel guys would pull my arm again.
I came back every other night, not wanting to run into the violin guy again, and because I wanted to see my blond haired cashier. He had long fingers and wore thin sweater that zipped up past his chin. His movements were overly animated and one time I came him he was handing out gifts to strangers.
“Oh, hello, would you like a glowstick for the next social gathering you’d be attending?” He had a British accent, and his voice carried it so sweetly. I felt charmed against my will.
“Yes.” He gave me the glowstick and went around the room, giving the remaining trinkets he had in his pockets: a few more glowsticks, some paperclips, someone else’s glasses case, his own broken zipper, a few sticks of gum that had limited edition flavors, more things. He came back to me as I was pretending to read the first chapter of the Tropic of Cancer.
“Oh, that’s brilliant. That’s really brilliant. He’s kind of a perv, isn’t it he though?”
“Yes.” I said, laughing. “I think he might be.” The bookstore was owned by a ninety year old man who had, in his youth, traversed through all of Central American on foot and after World War II, he came to Paris, rolled through the streets in tanks and his own clothes, because he did not have to enlist in the army—he had outsmarted the US government, and went to Paris as a journalist to take down quotes from French youth who were rioting in the streets. He set up a bookstore overlooking the Seine which gave free housing to travelers and poets. There were exactly thirteen beds in the bookstore, and the guy with the violin played his favorite Mozart song every night before bed, which was why the fifth time I saw him he had a mark beneath his eyes (from another guest punching him the in face after he refused to finish the song early.)
None of us forget each other’s birthdays because we were all born on the same day: December 25. Cindy is five years older than me, and I’m seven years older than Dennis. Cindy and I used to kiss him simultaneously, her on his left and me on his right cheek. We smushed him with this immense love that I still feel, but I guess don’t act out. We called it the Flattening Love Experiments. I don’t know who came up with the name. It sounds stupid now.
[More].
_____________
I lived on a small street off of rue de la Roquette. The falafel stands stayed open long past the bars—the men who manned them were constantly paying off debts, and they took breaks in between stuffing fries and slices of shaved lamb into pita bread to hoot at the girls.
“Bonjour Mademoiselles. Tres belle. Tres tres belle.”
“Aw, vous etes toute seule?”
“Bonjour petite chinoise. Bonjour. Hello? Hello.” I flushed the first time they spoke to me. I was walking down the rue de la Roquette on my own and one of the men grabbed my arm and pulled me to him.
“Excusez-moi mademoiselle.” I pulled my arm away and looked at a faraway, nonexistent object. My legs were going so slow.
“Excusez-moi. Petite chinoise, excusez-moi.”
After that, I learned that the whistling, the constant badgering, the way a man would follow you down a dark alley, would walk blocks with you and continue on more blocks even if you did not say anything, even if you did not breathe in his direction. The city was teaching me each day what to expect, the lifelessness and tediousness of learning a country’s customs and realizing that the things you found odd and strange were not strange at all, but just so commonplace that you yourself were the definition and example of triteness just by thinking the things you thought before someone came along and englightened you.
In Paris, I fell in love with a boy who worked the night shift at an English-language bookstore. There was another boy who played the violin and he said things like, “Oh of course, life is madness. But there is,” and then he would play something squeaky and ridiculously sentimental on his guitar, “some love and joy to be found in even the most maddening things.”
“Ha, ha,” I had said the first time I met him. “What other imitations do you do besides this one?”
“That’s not an imitation, you twat.” I ran away as fast as I could and ran the entire length home, slowing down when I thought one of the falafel guys would pull my arm again.
I came back every other night, not wanting to run into the violin guy again, and because I wanted to see my blond haired cashier. He had long fingers and wore thin sweater that zipped up past his chin. His movements were overly animated and one time I came him he was handing out gifts to strangers.
“Oh, hello, would you like a glowstick for the next social gathering you’d be attending?” He had a British accent, and his voice carried it so sweetly. I felt charmed against my will.
“Yes.” He gave me the glowstick and went around the room, giving the remaining trinkets he had in his pockets: a few more glowsticks, some paperclips, someone else’s glasses case, his own broken zipper, a few sticks of gum that had limited edition flavors, more things. He came back to me as I was pretending to read the first chapter of the Tropic of Cancer.
“Oh, that’s brilliant. That’s really brilliant. He’s kind of a perv, isn’t it he though?”
“Yes.” I said, laughing. “I think he might be.” The bookstore was owned by a ninety year old man who had, in his youth, traversed through all of Central American on foot and after World War II, he came to Paris, rolled through the streets in tanks and his own clothes, because he did not have to enlist in the army—he had outsmarted the US government, and went to Paris as a journalist to take down quotes from French youth who were rioting in the streets. He set up a bookstore overlooking the Seine which gave free housing to travelers and poets. There were exactly thirteen beds in the bookstore, and the guy with the violin played his favorite Mozart song every night before bed, which was why the fifth time I saw him he had a mark beneath his eyes (from another guest punching him the in face after he refused to finish the song early.)
Saturday, December 9, 2006
12-09-06
The reason why my sister thinks she’s going blind is because she can’t see her boyfriend’s face anymore. She calls me in the middle of the night and wakes up the entire family with her call. My dad emerges from his room and I allow myself to admit this: he’s getting old. The lines around his eyes are beautiful and deep. They come out the most when he smiles. He looks like a man who could seduce a much younger, much more beautiful woman than my mother, the kind of man who girls look and think, “He’s got sad eyes,” and it would have been a compliment, a brilliant remark that was as sweet as a dream that interrupts your real, waking life.
When my father’s angry, or tired, like he is tonight, the lines begin to look drawn-in, faked—as if someone went in and penciled lines of deep irritance right onto his face. It scares me and sometimes I tell him so, only to get him angrier with me.
He comes into my room without knocking, right after I pick up the phone.
“Who is it, Celia?”
“It’s just Cindy.”
“Chuh.” That’s the sound he makes when he want to evoke a certain emotion, or pass a certain kind of judgement on me. It’s the sound of hi shaking his head at me, or the sound of him seeing the things I do as ridiculous and illogical and only possibly tolerated by someone who has not suffered for the past tweny years and continues to suffer to this very day, even up to this very second.
“Chuh,” he says, as forcefully as someone who was woken up in the middle of the night can say something. “Both of you have too much time on your hands,” he says, and if he weren’t so tired, he would suggest a way for us to not have as much free time. A common suggestion: “Why don’t you mow the lawn and repaint the house? That should take up all this free time you seem to have and otherwise spend complaining.” That was one of his favorite things to say. Or, “Try being daddy for a day. You go to work, you get yelled at, you take care of twenty computers and twenty shouting stock brokers, and then you come home and make dinner, then you clean up, then you tell mommy you have to finish paying the bills when she gets her lower lip all fat and tries to get me to watch another episode of the latest TV show she’s watching, and then you, the next day handle her when she’s going off about all the bills we should have paid yesterday. I’d be happy to switch out for your life. When should we initiate the swap?” Tonight he simply says “scchuh,” to me and retreats back into his room.
[NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHAT GOES HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH.]
__________________
Around this time, I start to worry about dying. When I take my brother to the YMCA for his swimming lesson, I unbuckle my seatbelt during a red light and reach back to hold his hand for as long as the light stayed green.
He asks me, “Why’re you doing that?””
“I’m scared to lose you.” I close my eyes and imagine myself being shot in the face at night, being sent spiraling down the side of the highway in the morning when my dad takes the shorter windier route to Flushing, going to the doctor’s for a check-up and being told that I was fine only to have a vein in my brain explode as my mom took out a ten dollar co-pay, or worst of all, just getting old, fast, quick, each year feeling like a minute in retrospect and laying on my deathbed, already eighty, already seventy, just about to die and maybe doing something like getting up on my knees and begging, head to the sky, for whatever God there could possibly exist to let me live just a few more years.
“Um, why’re you talking like that?” I continue driving to the YMCA and drop him off at the showers and locker. I laugh when he comes out, his small seven year old body so so small, I think maybe he belongs on a toy store shelf, and I ask him over and over to please come here and let me hug him and when he finally does, I do the same thing I did in the car, hug him so long and so hard that he starts to push me away with both his hands, and when that doesn’t make me let go, he head butts me and that actually hurt me so I released my grip.
“Don’t hit me. I’m your sister and I just took you to your swimming class when I could have been at home watching TV.”
“You said one second. That was more than one second.”
I let him go and waddle around in his section of the pool. He takes a long time to learn how to swim, so even though this is his eighth week, he’s still a guppie, and Andrew Keneti, the other kid who attends Tuesday night swim lessons and is evenly matched to my brother in size is already on his way to being a shark.
I sit in the waiting room and all I can thinking about is dying, what it feels like, how it will happen to me, if I will even know that I’m about to die the moment before I die, if it’s better for me to just be obliterated without warning, or if I’d like to know so at least I can be aware of the days I have left to be happy, to feel the small cheeks of my brother against my hair and shoulders, to love the boys I see on the streets and shout out to and then run from, to ask my parents if they are scared to be the age they are now, and if they think about their parents, and then to ask my grandparents if they are scared of the days they have left, if they feel like it’s meaningful to do anything, if they think it was worth it after all, to have been born, to have been given a life that only feels so good as long as you know it will end and you will not even feel the life you led, you will not even know you were once born, and I think these songs so much, repeatedly and nonstop, that I end up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man not reading even one page of the book I had brought with me. It was, and although the night before, I had read it happily, if not a bit begrudgingly, today I could not even see the words on the page as anything at all. I think to myself, Maybe it this is what she means by I’m losing my vision Celia, you gotta believe me.
When my father’s angry, or tired, like he is tonight, the lines begin to look drawn-in, faked—as if someone went in and penciled lines of deep irritance right onto his face. It scares me and sometimes I tell him so, only to get him angrier with me.
He comes into my room without knocking, right after I pick up the phone.
“Who is it, Celia?”
“It’s just Cindy.”
“Chuh.” That’s the sound he makes when he want to evoke a certain emotion, or pass a certain kind of judgement on me. It’s the sound of hi shaking his head at me, or the sound of him seeing the things I do as ridiculous and illogical and only possibly tolerated by someone who has not suffered for the past tweny years and continues to suffer to this very day, even up to this very second.
“Chuh,” he says, as forcefully as someone who was woken up in the middle of the night can say something. “Both of you have too much time on your hands,” he says, and if he weren’t so tired, he would suggest a way for us to not have as much free time. A common suggestion: “Why don’t you mow the lawn and repaint the house? That should take up all this free time you seem to have and otherwise spend complaining.” That was one of his favorite things to say. Or, “Try being daddy for a day. You go to work, you get yelled at, you take care of twenty computers and twenty shouting stock brokers, and then you come home and make dinner, then you clean up, then you tell mommy you have to finish paying the bills when she gets her lower lip all fat and tries to get me to watch another episode of the latest TV show she’s watching, and then you, the next day handle her when she’s going off about all the bills we should have paid yesterday. I’d be happy to switch out for your life. When should we initiate the swap?” Tonight he simply says “scchuh,” to me and retreats back into his room.
[NEED TO FIGURE OUT WHAT GOES HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH.]
__________________
Around this time, I start to worry about dying. When I take my brother to the YMCA for his swimming lesson, I unbuckle my seatbelt during a red light and reach back to hold his hand for as long as the light stayed green.
He asks me, “Why’re you doing that?””
“I’m scared to lose you.” I close my eyes and imagine myself being shot in the face at night, being sent spiraling down the side of the highway in the morning when my dad takes the shorter windier route to Flushing, going to the doctor’s for a check-up and being told that I was fine only to have a vein in my brain explode as my mom took out a ten dollar co-pay, or worst of all, just getting old, fast, quick, each year feeling like a minute in retrospect and laying on my deathbed, already eighty, already seventy, just about to die and maybe doing something like getting up on my knees and begging, head to the sky, for whatever God there could possibly exist to let me live just a few more years.
“Um, why’re you talking like that?” I continue driving to the YMCA and drop him off at the showers and locker. I laugh when he comes out, his small seven year old body so so small, I think maybe he belongs on a toy store shelf, and I ask him over and over to please come here and let me hug him and when he finally does, I do the same thing I did in the car, hug him so long and so hard that he starts to push me away with both his hands, and when that doesn’t make me let go, he head butts me and that actually hurt me so I released my grip.
“Don’t hit me. I’m your sister and I just took you to your swimming class when I could have been at home watching TV.”
“You said one second. That was more than one second.”
I let him go and waddle around in his section of the pool. He takes a long time to learn how to swim, so even though this is his eighth week, he’s still a guppie, and Andrew Keneti, the other kid who attends Tuesday night swim lessons and is evenly matched to my brother in size is already on his way to being a shark.
I sit in the waiting room and all I can thinking about is dying, what it feels like, how it will happen to me, if I will even know that I’m about to die the moment before I die, if it’s better for me to just be obliterated without warning, or if I’d like to know so at least I can be aware of the days I have left to be happy, to feel the small cheeks of my brother against my hair and shoulders, to love the boys I see on the streets and shout out to and then run from, to ask my parents if they are scared to be the age they are now, and if they think about their parents, and then to ask my grandparents if they are scared of the days they have left, if they feel like it’s meaningful to do anything, if they think it was worth it after all, to have been born, to have been given a life that only feels so good as long as you know it will end and you will not even feel the life you led, you will not even know you were once born, and I think these songs so much, repeatedly and nonstop, that I end up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man not reading even one page of the book I had brought with me. It was, and although the night before, I had read it happily, if not a bit begrudgingly, today I could not even see the words on the page as anything at all. I think to myself, Maybe it this is what she means by I’m losing my vision Celia, you gotta believe me.
Friday, December 8, 2006
12-08-06
“Scchuh. Both of you have too much time on your hands,” he said, and if he weren’t so tired, he’d suggest a way for us to not have as much time. “Why don’t you mow the lawn and repaint the house? That should take up all this free time you seem to have and otherwise spend complaining.” That was one of his favorite things to say. Or, “Try being daddy for a day. You go to work, you get yelled at, you take care of twenty computers and twenty shouting stock brokers, and then you come home and make dinner, then you clean up, then you tell mommy you have to finish paying the bills when she gets her lower lip all fat and tries to get me to watch another episode of the latest TV show she’s watching, and then you, the next day handle her when she’s going off about all the bills we should have paid yesterday. I’d be happy to switch out for your life. When should we initiate the swap?” Tonight he simply says “scchuh,” to me and retreats back into his room.
“Celia?”
“Hi Cindy. You sound distressed.”
“I can’t see his face anymore. When we are lying in bed together and I lean in to give him a kiss, or sometimes I just want to see him up close—everything suddenly goes completely blurry.” Cindy lets out a breath, and if I could illustrate it, it would look like a jagged staircase. “I’m losing my vision.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I’m not. I can’t see him at all. It’s been one week and I swear, there are these things about him that I remember saying to you or someone else that I loved, like his long long eyelashes, and the little craters on the right side of his cheek from his bicycle accident, and I can only remember what these little body marks look like from zooming pictures on my computer and because I keep a really detailed journal.”
“Well, you’re obviously not losing your vision if you can see pictures on your computer.”
“Um, how is that obvious again?”
“Well. Losing your vision means you lose the ability to see. Having the ability to see something, such as a picture on your computer, means you do not meet the central criteria that would qualify you as a blind child.”
“You’re a regular whip-smart, ass-fuck these days aren’t you?”
“Yup.”
“I can’t exactly see the pictures on the computer either.”
“But you just said you could.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. By the way, why do you always lie?”
“By the way, no I didn’t.”
“By the way, yes you did.”
“I said that looking at photos on the computer is the only way for me to stir up an image of his face. I don’t even know if I really see anything. It’s like when mom keeps talking about the time you got yourself completely covered in mud and you came out of the garden and told her you planted four seeds and in a few weeks we’d have roses, and instead it turned out, you planted her two earrings that dad gave her as a gift, and some loose pearls that had come undone from her necklace. You don’t actually remember that memory, but there are just random, fairly innocuous things that trigger that memory.”
“Ok, what are we talking about?”
“
“Celia?”
“Hi Cindy. You sound distressed.”
“I can’t see his face anymore. When we are lying in bed together and I lean in to give him a kiss, or sometimes I just want to see him up close—everything suddenly goes completely blurry.” Cindy lets out a breath, and if I could illustrate it, it would look like a jagged staircase. “I’m losing my vision.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I’m not. I can’t see him at all. It’s been one week and I swear, there are these things about him that I remember saying to you or someone else that I loved, like his long long eyelashes, and the little craters on the right side of his cheek from his bicycle accident, and I can only remember what these little body marks look like from zooming pictures on my computer and because I keep a really detailed journal.”
“Well, you’re obviously not losing your vision if you can see pictures on your computer.”
“Um, how is that obvious again?”
“Well. Losing your vision means you lose the ability to see. Having the ability to see something, such as a picture on your computer, means you do not meet the central criteria that would qualify you as a blind child.”
“You’re a regular whip-smart, ass-fuck these days aren’t you?”
“Yup.”
“I can’t exactly see the pictures on the computer either.”
“But you just said you could.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. By the way, why do you always lie?”
“By the way, no I didn’t.”
“By the way, yes you did.”
“I said that looking at photos on the computer is the only way for me to stir up an image of his face. I don’t even know if I really see anything. It’s like when mom keeps talking about the time you got yourself completely covered in mud and you came out of the garden and told her you planted four seeds and in a few weeks we’d have roses, and instead it turned out, you planted her two earrings that dad gave her as a gift, and some loose pearls that had come undone from her necklace. You don’t actually remember that memory, but there are just random, fairly innocuous things that trigger that memory.”
“Ok, what are we talking about?”
“
Thursday, December 7, 2006
12-07-06
“Boys are strange,” she told me. She had a particular smell and that smell was a thousand flowers dripping with honey, a tiny hint of fairy dust. She could charm me and my sister into doing anything for her one minute, and anger us into taking her lipstick and scrawling YOU’RE A SELFISH BITCH XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (we had no idea what the X’s meant but for some reason whenever we were mad, we slashed X’s to emphasize how crazy raging mad we were) onto her dresser mirror in the afternoon when we were alone, and then guiltily wiped it off with Fantastic minutes before she came home, hastily throwing the lipstick out the window and feigning ignorance the next morning when she got up to do her make-up for work.
“Once, there was this rascal,” my mom continued as she covered up her hands with lotion, “who only had a father, no mother, which was why maybe he never understand the psyche of a woman, and he would follow me home every afternoon. From the minute class was let out to the moment I walked into my apartment, he would stand five steps behind him, taunting me, calling me names, threatening to push me into the mud, making fun of the way I walked, making fun of my long neck,” and she craned her neck up and measured it with her thumb and forefinger to show me, “making fun of the color of my hair, which was really quite red when I was younger, making fun of my parents, my mom, my dad, my brother, my friend who I walked home with, and I thought for sure he hated me, but I didn’t know why. I had never talked bad about anyone behind their backs or to their face the entire time I was growing up. I don’t think I even talked to this boy in my entire life, until he started following me, and even then I never really spoke to him. I just ignored him and wondered why he hated me so much.”
“Mom,” I started to say.
“But it turned out he was in love with me. He was in love with me and the only way he could express it at that age was by teasing me, throwing things at me. Once he even threw broken glass at me and my friend ran up to a police officer to tell him to arrest the kid, but those were corrupt days. The police officer only arrested kids if they were the kid of a professor. They left the poor ones alone to terrorize the city.”
“Mom, of course he liked you. It’s so obvious. Did you really not have any idea that he liked you?”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea whatsoever. I just had no idea whatsoever. You’re better than me when I was your age. When I was your age,” and she pulled in close to me and bent her head down low, “I thought maybe if I sat close with another man, it would get me pregnant. Your father took me to sit underneath a treat in the shade one summer and my hands wouldn’t touch his hands because I was shaking and sweating with fear. I thought I had gotten pregnant just from him looking at me. Can you believe your Mommy?” she asked me.
In school the next day, the other kids asked me why I ran out of gym, and some kid, Sophia or something pushed me and said I made our team lose, and I pushed her back and said, “So freaking what?”
“So that’s so uncool of you Celia. If you were going to run that fast out the door, you should have at least stayed and helped out the team first.”
“Leave me alone, you’re worse than a mosquito.”
My mother was the type of beautiful that I only read about later in books. I felt a startling alliance between the stories I read on the page and the stories my mom told me. When I read a 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, I pictured my own mother floating into the air, a halo of picked flowers, of hummingbirds humming a lovely song not too high, not too long, around my mother as she ascended, and I imagined that was the reason why sometimes I could tell she was not seeing us, my sister, me, later on, my brother. Sometimes, we were obstacles and we blocked her from the things she was interested in, whatever they were, we sometimes stood right in front of it, or our shadows cast a darkness, a sourness over the things that set her alight, glittering in the middle of winter when we were all gloomy, and she was just a momentary sprite of a thing that we tried to catch. What was the point? Our efforts were in vain. Our mother, herself, was vain.
What I mean, primarily, is that my mother grew up spoiled, used and inured to the idea of being a spectacle. Starting in the fourth grade, she no longer needed to do her chores. There was always someone to do them for her. The boy who wore his hair greasy and parted in the middle liked how long and shiny my mom’s hair was, and he offered to paint the fence around her parent’s tomato garden in exchange for ten strands of her hair wrapped in a small paper bag. After he painted her fence, my grandmother invited the boy up to their apartment and fed him a boiled tea egg and a soup with plenty of green onions.
“You’re young. You have your whole life to live. Don’t choose to waste it on painting fences for other people’s daughters. This one,” and my grandmother pointed sternly at my mother, “is not worth your time.”
At school the next day, my mom gave him ten strands of her hair, and he wanted her to promise it was her hair by letting him twist her arm behind her back but my mom refused and he couldn’t do anything because their teacher was watching, and in fact, my mom hadn’t give him ten strands of her own hair, but a strand of hair from each of her ten closest girlfriends who dared her to do this over hiccupped giggles.
The boy came to her the next day and thrust the bag of her hair into my mom’s face and yelled out, “You’re a goddamn liar.” It turned out he had memorized the smell of her hair and when he got home to smell the strands of hair he had walked home with, he realized immediately that she had played him.
“Mom,” I said to her, after hearing this story for the first time, “do you know what you’d say if you had been living here at the time?”
“No, what?”
“He’d go like, can you give me some of your hair for being your bitch slave, and you’d be like fine, and then he’d go on and be your slave and do your chores and you would give him the hair, and a minute later, you’d be all like, I told you I’d give you some of my hair………….. SIKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
My mom really had no idea what I was talking about.
The reason why my sister thinks she’s going blind is because she can’t see her boyfriend’s face anymore. She calls me in the middle of the night and wakes up the entire family with her call. My dad emerges from his room and I have to finally admit this: he’s getting old. The lines around his eyes are beautiful when he smiles. He looks like a man who could seduce a much younger, much more beautiful woman than my mother, the kind of man who girls look at and think, “he’s got sad eyes,” and it would have been a compliment. When he’s angry, or tired, like he is tonight, they look drawn-in, faked, as if someone went in and penciled lines of deep irritance right onto his face. It scares me.
“Who is it, Celia?”
“It’s just Cindy.” “Schhuhhh.” That’s the sound he makes when he wants to evoke a certain emotion and judgment. The sound of him shaking his head at me, or the sound of him seeing the things I do as ridiculous and illogical and only possibly tolerated by someone who has not suffered for the past twenty years and continues to suffer to this very day, this very exact second.
“Once, there was this rascal,” my mom continued as she covered up her hands with lotion, “who only had a father, no mother, which was why maybe he never understand the psyche of a woman, and he would follow me home every afternoon. From the minute class was let out to the moment I walked into my apartment, he would stand five steps behind him, taunting me, calling me names, threatening to push me into the mud, making fun of the way I walked, making fun of my long neck,” and she craned her neck up and measured it with her thumb and forefinger to show me, “making fun of the color of my hair, which was really quite red when I was younger, making fun of my parents, my mom, my dad, my brother, my friend who I walked home with, and I thought for sure he hated me, but I didn’t know why. I had never talked bad about anyone behind their backs or to their face the entire time I was growing up. I don’t think I even talked to this boy in my entire life, until he started following me, and even then I never really spoke to him. I just ignored him and wondered why he hated me so much.”
“Mom,” I started to say.
“But it turned out he was in love with me. He was in love with me and the only way he could express it at that age was by teasing me, throwing things at me. Once he even threw broken glass at me and my friend ran up to a police officer to tell him to arrest the kid, but those were corrupt days. The police officer only arrested kids if they were the kid of a professor. They left the poor ones alone to terrorize the city.”
“Mom, of course he liked you. It’s so obvious. Did you really not have any idea that he liked you?”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea whatsoever. I just had no idea whatsoever. You’re better than me when I was your age. When I was your age,” and she pulled in close to me and bent her head down low, “I thought maybe if I sat close with another man, it would get me pregnant. Your father took me to sit underneath a treat in the shade one summer and my hands wouldn’t touch his hands because I was shaking and sweating with fear. I thought I had gotten pregnant just from him looking at me. Can you believe your Mommy?” she asked me.
In school the next day, the other kids asked me why I ran out of gym, and some kid, Sophia or something pushed me and said I made our team lose, and I pushed her back and said, “So freaking what?”
“So that’s so uncool of you Celia. If you were going to run that fast out the door, you should have at least stayed and helped out the team first.”
“Leave me alone, you’re worse than a mosquito.”
My mother was the type of beautiful that I only read about later in books. I felt a startling alliance between the stories I read on the page and the stories my mom told me. When I read a 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, I pictured my own mother floating into the air, a halo of picked flowers, of hummingbirds humming a lovely song not too high, not too long, around my mother as she ascended, and I imagined that was the reason why sometimes I could tell she was not seeing us, my sister, me, later on, my brother. Sometimes, we were obstacles and we blocked her from the things she was interested in, whatever they were, we sometimes stood right in front of it, or our shadows cast a darkness, a sourness over the things that set her alight, glittering in the middle of winter when we were all gloomy, and she was just a momentary sprite of a thing that we tried to catch. What was the point? Our efforts were in vain. Our mother, herself, was vain.
What I mean, primarily, is that my mother grew up spoiled, used and inured to the idea of being a spectacle. Starting in the fourth grade, she no longer needed to do her chores. There was always someone to do them for her. The boy who wore his hair greasy and parted in the middle liked how long and shiny my mom’s hair was, and he offered to paint the fence around her parent’s tomato garden in exchange for ten strands of her hair wrapped in a small paper bag. After he painted her fence, my grandmother invited the boy up to their apartment and fed him a boiled tea egg and a soup with plenty of green onions.
“You’re young. You have your whole life to live. Don’t choose to waste it on painting fences for other people’s daughters. This one,” and my grandmother pointed sternly at my mother, “is not worth your time.”
At school the next day, my mom gave him ten strands of her hair, and he wanted her to promise it was her hair by letting him twist her arm behind her back but my mom refused and he couldn’t do anything because their teacher was watching, and in fact, my mom hadn’t give him ten strands of her own hair, but a strand of hair from each of her ten closest girlfriends who dared her to do this over hiccupped giggles.
The boy came to her the next day and thrust the bag of her hair into my mom’s face and yelled out, “You’re a goddamn liar.” It turned out he had memorized the smell of her hair and when he got home to smell the strands of hair he had walked home with, he realized immediately that she had played him.
“Mom,” I said to her, after hearing this story for the first time, “do you know what you’d say if you had been living here at the time?”
“No, what?”
“He’d go like, can you give me some of your hair for being your bitch slave, and you’d be like fine, and then he’d go on and be your slave and do your chores and you would give him the hair, and a minute later, you’d be all like, I told you I’d give you some of my hair………….. SIKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
My mom really had no idea what I was talking about.
The reason why my sister thinks she’s going blind is because she can’t see her boyfriend’s face anymore. She calls me in the middle of the night and wakes up the entire family with her call. My dad emerges from his room and I have to finally admit this: he’s getting old. The lines around his eyes are beautiful when he smiles. He looks like a man who could seduce a much younger, much more beautiful woman than my mother, the kind of man who girls look at and think, “he’s got sad eyes,” and it would have been a compliment. When he’s angry, or tired, like he is tonight, they look drawn-in, faked, as if someone went in and penciled lines of deep irritance right onto his face. It scares me.
“Who is it, Celia?”
“It’s just Cindy.” “Schhuhhh.” That’s the sound he makes when he wants to evoke a certain emotion and judgment. The sound of him shaking his head at me, or the sound of him seeing the things I do as ridiculous and illogical and only possibly tolerated by someone who has not suffered for the past twenty years and continues to suffer to this very day, this very exact second.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
12-06-06
“Boys are strange,” she told me. She had a particular smell and that smell was a thousand flowers dripping with honey, a tiny hint of fairy dust. She could charm me and my sister into doing anything for her one minute, and anger us into taking her lipstick and scrawling MOM, YOU’RE A SELFISH BITCH XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (we had no idea what the X’s meant but for some reason whenever we were made, we slashed X’s to emphasize how crazy raging made we were) onto her dresser mirror in the afternoon when we were alone, and then guiltily wipe it off with Fantastic minutes before she came home, hastily throwing the lipstick out the window and feigning ignorance the next morning when she got up to do her make-up for work. “Once, there was this rascal who only had a father, no mother, which was why maybe he never understand the psyche of a woman, and he would follow me home every afternoon. From the minute class was let out, to the moment I walked into my apartment he would stand five steps behind him, taunting me, calling me names, threatening to push me into the mud, making fun of the way I walked, making fun of my long neck,” and she craned her neck up and measured it with her thumb and forefinger to show me, “making fun of the color of my hair, which was really quite red when I was younger, making fun of my parents, my mom, my dad, my brother, my friend who I walked home with, and I thought for sure he hated me, but I didn’t know why. I had never talked bad about anyone behind their backs or to their face the entire time I was growing up. I don’t think I even talked to this boy in my entire life, until he started following me, and even then I never really spoke to him. I just ignored him and wondered why he hated me so much.”
“Mom,” I started to say.
“But it turned out he was in love with me. He was in love with me and the only way he could express it at that age was by teasing me, throwing things at me. Once he even threw broken glass at me and my friend ran up to a police officer to tell him to arrest the kid, but those were corrupt days. The police officer only arrested kids if they were the kid of a professor. They left the poor ones alone to terrorize the city.”
“Mom, of course he liked you. It’s so obvious. Did you really not have any idea that he liked you?”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea whatsoever. I just had no idea whatsoever. You’re better than me when I was your age. When I was your age,” and she pulled in close to me and bent her head down low, “I thought maybe if I sat close with another man, it would get your pregnant. Your father took me to sit underneath a treat in the shade one summer and my hands wouldn’t touch his hands because I was shaking and sweating with fear. I thought I had gotten pregnant just from him looking at me. Can you believe your mom?” she asked me.
In school the next day, the other kids asked me why I ran out of gym, and some kid, Sophia or something pushed me and said I made our team lose, and I pushed her back and said, “So freaking what?”
“So that’s so uncool of you Celia. If you were going to run that fast out the door, you should have at least stayed and helped out the team first.”
“Leave me alone, you’re worse than a mosquito.”
My mother was the type of beautiful that I only read about later in books, and felt a startling alliance between the stories I read on the page and the stories my mom told me. When I read a 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, I pictured my own mother floating into the air, a halo of picked flowers, of hummingbirds humming a lovely song not too high, not too long, around my mother as she ascended, and I imagined that was the reason why sometimes I could tell she was not seeing us, my sister, me, later on, my brother. Sometimes, we were obstacles and we blocked her from the things she was interested in, whatever they were, we sometimes stood right in front of it, or our shadows cast a darkness, a sourness over the things that set her alight, glittering in the middle of winter when we were all gloomy, and she was just a sprite we all tried to catch.
What I mean, primarily, is that my mother grew up spoiled, used and inured to the idea of being a spectacle. Starting in the fourth grade, she no longer needed to do her chores. They were always done for her.
“Mom,” I started to say.
“But it turned out he was in love with me. He was in love with me and the only way he could express it at that age was by teasing me, throwing things at me. Once he even threw broken glass at me and my friend ran up to a police officer to tell him to arrest the kid, but those were corrupt days. The police officer only arrested kids if they were the kid of a professor. They left the poor ones alone to terrorize the city.”
“Mom, of course he liked you. It’s so obvious. Did you really not have any idea that he liked you?”
“I had no idea,” she said. “I had no idea whatsoever. I just had no idea whatsoever. You’re better than me when I was your age. When I was your age,” and she pulled in close to me and bent her head down low, “I thought maybe if I sat close with another man, it would get your pregnant. Your father took me to sit underneath a treat in the shade one summer and my hands wouldn’t touch his hands because I was shaking and sweating with fear. I thought I had gotten pregnant just from him looking at me. Can you believe your mom?” she asked me.
In school the next day, the other kids asked me why I ran out of gym, and some kid, Sophia or something pushed me and said I made our team lose, and I pushed her back and said, “So freaking what?”
“So that’s so uncool of you Celia. If you were going to run that fast out the door, you should have at least stayed and helped out the team first.”
“Leave me alone, you’re worse than a mosquito.”
My mother was the type of beautiful that I only read about later in books, and felt a startling alliance between the stories I read on the page and the stories my mom told me. When I read a 100 Years of Solitude by Marquez, I pictured my own mother floating into the air, a halo of picked flowers, of hummingbirds humming a lovely song not too high, not too long, around my mother as she ascended, and I imagined that was the reason why sometimes I could tell she was not seeing us, my sister, me, later on, my brother. Sometimes, we were obstacles and we blocked her from the things she was interested in, whatever they were, we sometimes stood right in front of it, or our shadows cast a darkness, a sourness over the things that set her alight, glittering in the middle of winter when we were all gloomy, and she was just a sprite we all tried to catch.
What I mean, primarily, is that my mother grew up spoiled, used and inured to the idea of being a spectacle. Starting in the fourth grade, she no longer needed to do her chores. They were always done for her.
Tuesday, December 5, 2006
12-05-06
When my mother was fifteen, she was a foot taller than all her girlfriend and her back was often spotted with red marks from the boys who followed her after school and threw pebbles at her. During my last year of elementary school a boy knocked me against the wall of the gymnasium and said, “I love you,” and it scared the living shit of me so I started running, even though we were in the middle of gym class and I was four turns away from being tagged for the relay race, and I figured running was running, all the same, who cared what direction you were supposed to go in, as long as you kept those legs moving. So I ran straight through the gymnasium door, and I swear, I goddamn swear, it’s really not such a stupid trite thing for movies to show the scene where the protagonist bursts through a pair of doors and opens his or her arms wide into the blindingly bright light. It was that way, exactly.
I ran through the gymnasium doors, into the long hallway, skidding past the band room, past the various art rooms, past the main office where the hunched over ladies worked and barely blinked or looked you in the eye when talking to you, or handing you some kind of form, and I ran right through the double doors that led into the small lobby, straight into the last set of double doors and right into a blinding white nothing. Bam, bam, bam—I hated boys. I wanted them dead, I wanted to develop muscles that could kill any boy who lurched at me, any boy who teased me or tried to write things on the back of my stockings with white out pens, and I wanted to kill the adults who peered at me with their pocked faces and asked me if I wanted to get married and move out of my parent’s house and would I like to marry that boy or that other boy who, of course, was the son of whoever was asking me these questions, who was, of course, sitting right there, across from me and pretending to look at the ceiling cracks, or the bitten off part of his cuticles. The whole affair, the whole charade of pretending boys who were my age didn’t immediately make me convulse with disgust and complete terror only made me love the boy who sometimes gave me a Starburst at the video store more. It made me jealous of my sister that she was already the age that I would have to be if I wanted to kiss a boy who was in high school, or better yet, in college, or the very absolute best: A GROWN MAN!
“Mom, I hate boys my age. I want to kick them in the legs, but I think I inherited a really weak body from you,” I told her, one day, at night after dinner, when my sister Cindy was upstairs doing a project, and my dad was downstairs putting in some numbers and bills into this new accounting program he had gotten. Our basement downstairs was filled with computer monitors and keyboards and mouses and hard-drives and so many cords and outlets and plugs. There was a constant hum that covered the smell of our washed laundry which we also kept in the basement, hung up in the door next to my dad’s computer room, where the furnace was, and where my dad rolled up sheets of insulation with gloves and pushed them up against our unfinished walls, and told me that I ever tried to touch those pink insulating sheets, if I even went anywhere close to it, I would be itchy from that moment on for the rest of my life, and if I was planning to live a long life, then boy oh boy, it was going to be one long itchy life.
Most of my friends now have computers that are so small and sleek. The grayish, beigish Dell and Compaq hard-drives that are still packed into my dad’s computer room look so antiquated to me now. It looks so sad—a sign of my father’s permanence mixed in with decline. I constantly wanted new things and every now and then I would get them. My father wouldn’t even buy himself a new pair of sneakers until the hole in his old ones got so big that a small pat of his big toe was nearly ice blue with frostbite after a long hike through the top of Bear Mountain to find my brother on an overly cold November morning. I didn’t want my father to let me have the things I wanted, I didn’t want him to spoil me to the point that he could make self-aware of the fact that I was increasingly ashamed by him, the shabby clothes he wore, the over-the-top outdated computers he was still using. I stopped going to the computer room when I was sixteen, except sometimes to just stand there, looking at the only private space my father ever had. Sometimes, I stood there and cried for him quickly, and then dried my tears. I did not want him to ever know I did this.
When I told my mom that I hated boys and that I wanted them dead by my own physical prowess, she smiled and wrapped her beautiful long thin hands around my cheeks.
when movies show the scene where the protagonist bursts through a pair of doors and opens his or her arms wide into the blindingly bright white light which then envelopes his beautiful, flawless face. It was that way, exactly.
I ran through the gymnasium doors, into the long hallway, skidding past the band room, past the various art rooms, past the main office where the hunched over ladies worked and barely blinked or looked you in the eye when talking to you, or handing you some kind of form, and I ran right through the double doors that led into the small lobby, straight into the last set of double doors and right into a blinding white nothing. Bam, bam, bam—I hated boys. I wanted them dead, I wanted to develop muscles that could kill any boy who lurched at me, any boy who teased me or tried to write things on the back of my stockings with white out pens, and I wanted to kill the adults who peered at me with their pocked faces and asked me if I wanted to get married and move out of my parent’s house and would I like to marry that boy or that other boy who, of course, was the son of whoever was asking me these questions, who was, of course, sitting right there, across from me and pretending to look at the ceiling cracks, or the bitten off part of his cuticles. The whole affair, the whole charade of pretending boys who were my age didn’t immediately make me convulse with disgust and complete terror only made me love the boy who sometimes gave me a Starburst at the video store more. It made me jealous of my sister that she was already the age that I would have to be if I wanted to kiss a boy who was in high school, or better yet, in college, or the very absolute best: A GROWN MAN!
“Mom, I hate boys my age. I want to kick them in the legs, but I think I inherited a really weak body from you,” I told her, one day, at night after dinner, when my sister Cindy was upstairs doing a project, and my dad was downstairs putting in some numbers and bills into this new accounting program he had gotten. Our basement downstairs was filled with computer monitors and keyboards and mouses and hard-drives and so many cords and outlets and plugs. There was a constant hum that covered the smell of our washed laundry which we also kept in the basement, hung up in the door next to my dad’s computer room, where the furnace was, and where my dad rolled up sheets of insulation with gloves and pushed them up against our unfinished walls, and told me that I ever tried to touch those pink insulating sheets, if I even went anywhere close to it, I would be itchy from that moment on for the rest of my life, and if I was planning to live a long life, then boy oh boy, it was going to be one long itchy life.
Most of my friends now have computers that are so small and sleek. The grayish, beigish Dell and Compaq hard-drives that are still packed into my dad’s computer room look so antiquated to me now. It looks so sad—a sign of my father’s permanence mixed in with decline. I constantly wanted new things and every now and then I would get them. My father wouldn’t even buy himself a new pair of sneakers until the hole in his old ones got so big that a small pat of his big toe was nearly ice blue with frostbite after a long hike through the top of Bear Mountain to find my brother on an overly cold November morning. I didn’t want my father to let me have the things I wanted, I didn’t want him to spoil me to the point that he could make self-aware of the fact that I was increasingly ashamed by him, the shabby clothes he wore, the over-the-top outdated computers he was still using. I stopped going to the computer room when I was sixteen, except sometimes to just stand there, looking at the only private space my father ever had. Sometimes, I stood there and cried for him quickly, and then dried my tears. I did not want him to ever know I did this.
When I told my mom that I hated boys and that I wanted them dead by my own physical prowess, she smiled and wrapped her beautiful long thin hands around my cheeks.
when movies show the scene where the protagonist bursts through a pair of doors and opens his or her arms wide into the blindingly bright white light which then envelopes his beautiful, flawless face. It was that way, exactly.
Monday, December 4, 2006
12-04-06
We went to show where the lead singer had long, long curly hair. He wore it the way I way my hair, parted to the sides, falling out behind my ears and then back in again each time I reach over to tuck them back, and he played the guitar with his eyes closed. He was sort of timid and sometimes he played the same thing over and over and over again and I felt like I did in English class last year when I was reading the Scarlett Letter and pretending to understand why it’s important, and then he would take the guitar real low and walk on every part of the stage and my eyelids fluttered and reopened and I watched him like a crazy person. I felt like a crazy person. After the main act came on, I felt my fever coming on again, and I touched my friends Bonnie and Donald with the tips of my fingers and pushed my way through the crowd.
It smelled so bad that night. Spoiled beef jerky. My friend Tony told me the way his mom makes beef jerky is to literally cut a small slice of beef and set it out underneath the afternoon sun and let it bake until it was a smelly slice of jerky, and boy and boy that was the most delicious kind of jerky, the smelly kind, just like when you cook a rotten piece of tofu and you put the right spices to make it smell even more rotten, like a skunk throwing up trash, but worse, and it turns out that is the best tasting tofu in the entire world. I took a small detour to the bathroom and stood by the smaller bar—there were two bars in the venue and the small bar had its own room so that it was like a small living room with rows and rows of whiskey, vodka, draft beers, clean glasses and ups of neatly sliced lemon, lime, and standing in front of the whole damn thing was the guitarist pushing back the thick strands of his curls behind his ears, at the very same time I was pushing back my limp black thin nothing strands of not that beautiful, not that special, nothing to see hair.
It is normal to feel like you love someone before even speaking to him? He looked unshowered and one time my friend Tony told me it was noticing the flaws on someone that makes you sure you are in love with them, and even gives you the delusional force to believe that maybe the flaws you found are flaws that most people could never forgive or oversee in another person, and maybe even though you are not anything, not someone who is beautiful to merit a second take, not someone who stands like there is a constant arrangement of small daisies and hummingbirds flittering and circling right above your head, even though you are not a luminous, glittering sprite, you were quick enough to identify the flaws in the person who you do love, who does walk with small tiny birds singing above his head, and you could care less about those flaws, and could only hope with the tiny, most tenuous strand of hope that most people in this world did care, and that they would not forgive or overlook and it meant that the person you loved would never be loved by anyone else, even if he loved someone that someone would not love him back, and he would be forced to love you if he wanted love, so that the only potential problems were this:
1) What if he didn't care about these things?
2) What if he'd rather shoot himself in the foot than be with you, even if you were the last lonely girl on this overpopulated (but somehow decimated) planet?
It smelled so bad that night. Spoiled beef jerky. My friend Tony told me the way his mom makes beef jerky is to literally cut a small slice of beef and set it out underneath the afternoon sun and let it bake until it was a smelly slice of jerky, and boy and boy that was the most delicious kind of jerky, the smelly kind, just like when you cook a rotten piece of tofu and you put the right spices to make it smell even more rotten, like a skunk throwing up trash, but worse, and it turns out that is the best tasting tofu in the entire world. I took a small detour to the bathroom and stood by the smaller bar—there were two bars in the venue and the small bar had its own room so that it was like a small living room with rows and rows of whiskey, vodka, draft beers, clean glasses and ups of neatly sliced lemon, lime, and standing in front of the whole damn thing was the guitarist pushing back the thick strands of his curls behind his ears, at the very same time I was pushing back my limp black thin nothing strands of not that beautiful, not that special, nothing to see hair.
It is normal to feel like you love someone before even speaking to him? He looked unshowered and one time my friend Tony told me it was noticing the flaws on someone that makes you sure you are in love with them, and even gives you the delusional force to believe that maybe the flaws you found are flaws that most people could never forgive or oversee in another person, and maybe even though you are not anything, not someone who is beautiful to merit a second take, not someone who stands like there is a constant arrangement of small daisies and hummingbirds flittering and circling right above your head, even though you are not a luminous, glittering sprite, you were quick enough to identify the flaws in the person who you do love, who does walk with small tiny birds singing above his head, and you could care less about those flaws, and could only hope with the tiny, most tenuous strand of hope that most people in this world did care, and that they would not forgive or overlook and it meant that the person you loved would never be loved by anyone else, even if he loved someone that someone would not love him back, and he would be forced to love you if he wanted love, so that the only potential problems were this:
1) What if he didn't care about these things?
2) What if he'd rather shoot himself in the foot than be with you, even if you were the last lonely girl on this overpopulated (but somehow decimated) planet?
Sunday, December 3, 2006
12-03-06
On the day my brother was born, I was seven, and my friend Hanzhi, who later changed name to Harry was six, and no one even started to make fun of us for being friends until I was about nine and he was about eight, and it served us right because we were asking for with our role playing games—I was his wife, he was handsome, we serve in the secret service and spent our entire lives trying to vanquish the top enemies (his dad and my dad of course), and in our free time we pretended to sleep like husband and wife, and because we were so freaking hyper all the time, when we pretended to sleep, we actually fell asleep, and all the grown ups, and all the grown children fawned at us, and whispered annoying things like, “They’re so crazy when they’re conscious, but look how beautiful they look now,” as if we were better unconscious, as if the most beautiful state we could ever achieve was like being in a coma!
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was in her last year of high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of our grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why would she want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a piece of crap.” On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas and I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please please please not forget to get me a real present if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on Christmas, but despite all that I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not even digest because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekends, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of big fat presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born. He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano and I had to do one full hour, and it didn’t matter afternoon or morning. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon if I was cute all morning my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was in her last year of high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of our grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why would she want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a piece of crap.” On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas and I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please please please not forget to get me a real present if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on Christmas, but despite all that I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not even digest because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekends, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of big fat presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born. He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano and I had to do one full hour, and it didn’t matter afternoon or morning. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon if I was cute all morning my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
Saturday, December 2, 2006
12-02-06
My sister is in love with the video store clerk. He has small green eyes and wears the same thing everyday. I don’t tell her, but I was in love with him first. He doesn’t actually work there anymore, but sometimes we see him around town with paint splattered over his clothes. He paints houses now, and we scheme to get him to paint our house by trying to chip off the paint with sticks and our brother’s baseball bat. If mom and dad catch us we’re dead meat.
The first time we went into the video store was when we had just moved into this town. It was a long time ago and we were all jazzed to see so many trees, parking lots that didn’t charge by the hour, and such clean street corners. I checked out Home Alone 2, and my sister checked out some movie about two girls too wild to stay home, so they hopped into a car together and ran off to the desert to smoke pot, pick wild flowers to put in their hair, and sleep with boys who never wore shirts. It was a stupid movie, and the parts when the boys unzipped their pants where the parts where my mom told me to cover my eyes and I did but still saw everything through the slats of my parted fingers. That night, my sister had a shouting match with my mom and my dad looked like he wasn’t going to get involved but at the very end he looked like he was going to slap her but instead of slapping her he shouted louder than anyone else in my family has ever shouted, and we all felt the ringing in his voice, that frightening linger of anger in out bones for days afterwards.
The reason I loved the video store clerk with the green eyes is because I started sneezing like crazy when I first entered the store because earlier I had been playing with my friend Chrissie’s cat and it turned out I was really allergic to cats so the whole rest of the day I couldn’t sneezing and Gary, the boy I loved gave me a box of Kleenex and while I was blowing snot into the Kleenex, he showed me how to make a tissue flower, and he said, “A white rose for the girl with the allergies!”
The first time we went into the video store was when we had just moved into this town. It was a long time ago and we were all jazzed to see so many trees, parking lots that didn’t charge by the hour, and such clean street corners. I checked out Home Alone 2, and my sister checked out some movie about two girls too wild to stay home, so they hopped into a car together and ran off to the desert to smoke pot, pick wild flowers to put in their hair, and sleep with boys who never wore shirts. It was a stupid movie, and the parts when the boys unzipped their pants where the parts where my mom told me to cover my eyes and I did but still saw everything through the slats of my parted fingers. That night, my sister had a shouting match with my mom and my dad looked like he wasn’t going to get involved but at the very end he looked like he was going to slap her but instead of slapping her he shouted louder than anyone else in my family has ever shouted, and we all felt the ringing in his voice, that frightening linger of anger in out bones for days afterwards.
The reason I loved the video store clerk with the green eyes is because I started sneezing like crazy when I first entered the store because earlier I had been playing with my friend Chrissie’s cat and it turned out I was really allergic to cats so the whole rest of the day I couldn’t sneezing and Gary, the boy I loved gave me a box of Kleenex and while I was blowing snot into the Kleenex, he showed me how to make a tissue flower, and he said, “A white rose for the girl with the allergies!”
Friday, December 1, 2006
12-01-06
My sister says she’s going blind and I think she’s being dramatic as usual. When I was five, she told me she was dying, right there, on the spot, and she clutched her throat, ripped off a little piece of my art project that I had finished at school and brought home to show mom and dad, put it in her mouth (and it was the piece with some dried macaroni and clear Elmer’s glue,) and made a horrible sound like a completely fake dinosaur, not a real one, like the dinosaurs whose bones hang from the ceiling of the Natural Museum of History, extremely faked dinosaur, like the ones in Jurassic Park the movie, the stupid ass movie that I’ve now watched twenty times, two times for each day I’ve had to babysit my brother, which if you do the math, is ten days. So she made that sound and she dropped to the floor, her hand still holding on to her throat and she took a small break from faking her death and told me the story about the man who married a woman and every hour of every day and night she wore a small pink ribbon around her neck and told him to never try to touch or, or heaven forbid, untie it, and it drove him so mad that he gave her a bunch of sleeping pills one day and then when she was snoring like a passed out alcoholic, he untied the ribbon, and BAM, her fucking head rolled right off.
“Please don’t die,” I begged her. At the time, I was in my first month of kindergarten, and already, I was so fucking stupid. I spent all of my afternoons alone with my sister in our house. We lived ten blocks from the beach, and they were ten short blocks. In the summers, the air smelled bad. It smelled like uncooked seafood and sometimes I wanted to puke. The house would get really still during the day, when no one was there, although later I found out sometimes my sister hid in the basement until my parents had dropped me off to school and they had gone off to work, and she would emerge into the morning sun which shone straight into our living room and kitchen and illuminated all of our furniture, my mom’s green plants, the block of iced meat that my dad set out every morning to thaw for dinner, and my parents change of clothing, which consisted of long underwear and pajama sets from China with hideous designs like cheesy potted plants and garden tools with the words “J’aime le soleil,” in ugly cursive that even I could do better than, and my sister would emerge into all of that, all of the things I thought no one got to touch or see or be around during the hours of 8:30 and 3:30, but she, the sneak, the liar, the deceptacon, actually got to see it quite often, and she was also the reason why our heating bills were always higher than my parents expected because she would turn the thermostat to 85, so she could prance around in my mom’s old clothes, her skirts and water-filled bras, and when I came home, she would turn it back down to 60, which was the same as freezing butt as cold, and she would calm down, and the two of us would sit at the kitchen table, eating whatever snacks our parents had bought us the Sunday before, and twiddle our thumbs in our cold, static house.
“Please don’t die,” I begged her. At the time, I was in my first month of kindergarten, and already, I was so fucking stupid. I spent all of my afternoons alone with my sister in our house. We lived ten blocks from the beach, and they were ten short blocks. In the summers, the air smelled bad. It smelled like uncooked seafood and sometimes I wanted to puke. The house would get really still during the day, when no one was there, although later I found out sometimes my sister hid in the basement until my parents had dropped me off to school and they had gone off to work, and she would emerge into the morning sun which shone straight into our living room and kitchen and illuminated all of our furniture, my mom’s green plants, the block of iced meat that my dad set out every morning to thaw for dinner, and my parents change of clothing, which consisted of long underwear and pajama sets from China with hideous designs like cheesy potted plants and garden tools with the words “J’aime le soleil,” in ugly cursive that even I could do better than, and my sister would emerge into all of that, all of the things I thought no one got to touch or see or be around during the hours of 8:30 and 3:30, but she, the sneak, the liar, the deceptacon, actually got to see it quite often, and she was also the reason why our heating bills were always higher than my parents expected because she would turn the thermostat to 85, so she could prance around in my mom’s old clothes, her skirts and water-filled bras, and when I came home, she would turn it back down to 60, which was the same as freezing butt as cold, and she would calm down, and the two of us would sit at the kitchen table, eating whatever snacks our parents had bought us the Sunday before, and twiddle our thumbs in our cold, static house.
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